Court To Hear About Vaccine Side Effects
March 10, 2010
Associated Press
The Supreme Court will decide whether drug makers can be sued by parents who claim their children suffered serious health problems from vaccines.
The justices on Monday agreed to hear an appeal from parents in Pittsburgh who want to sue Wyeth over the serious side effects their daughter, six months old at the time, allegedly suffered as a result of the company’s diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine.
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled against Robalee and Russell Bruesewitz, saying a 1986 federal law bars their claims.
That law set up a special vaccine court to handle disputes as part of its aim of insuring a stable vaccine supply by shielding companies from most lawsuits.
Wyeth, now owned by Pfizer, Inc., prevailed at the appeals court but also joined in asking the court to hear the case, saying it presents an important and recurring legal issue that should be resolved.
The Obama administration joined the parties in calling for high court review, although the government takes the side of the manufacturers.
Only one state appeals court, the Georgia Supreme Court, has ruled that families can sue in a vaccine case. The vaccine industry has fiercely opposed the Georgia ruling in the case of Marcelo and Carolyn Ferrari. They claim their son suffered neurological damage after receiving vaccine booster shots made by pharmaceutical companies Wyeth and GlaxoSmithKline that contained the preservative thimerosal.
The family has since withdrawn its lawsuit, possibly in an effort to avoid an unfavorable Supreme Court ruling, although the Georgia court’s opinion allowing similar lawsuits remains in force.
The court did not act on the companies’ appeal Monday, but the decision in the other case almost certainly will apply to the Georgia case.
According to the lawsuit, Hannah Bruesewitz was a healthy infant until she received the vaccine in April 1992. Within hours of getting the DPT shot, the third in a series of five, the baby suffered a series of debilitating seizures. Now a teenager, Hannah suffers from residual seizure disorder, the suit says.
The vaccine court earlier rejected the family’s claims.
Wyeth lost another high court fight last year over whether federal law barred lawsuits against drug makers. That case, involving a botched injection, asked whether federal law included an implicit prohibition on the lawsuits. The court said it did not.
In this appeal, however, Congress clearly laid out how claims over vaccines were to be made, and the court has repeatedly ruled against plaintiffs when Congress has explicitly sought to bar lawsuits.
Other than the Georgia court, state and federal courts have uniformly invoked a provision of the 1986 federal law, which seems to bar most lawsuits against vaccine makers.
The idea behind the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act was to ensure a stable supply of childhood vaccines by shielding drug makers from most lawsuits, and setting up a federal vaccine court to handle disputes. The law would serve to block state laws that otherwise would give families the ability to sue the manufacturers.
In recent years, the legal fight has frequently come from families of autistic children claiming that mercury-based thimerosal is linked to autism. Numerous studies have addressed vaccines and autism and found no link, including with the preservative.
Thimerosal has been removed in recent years from standard childhood vaccines, except flu vaccines that are not packaged in single doses.
Last year, special masters appointed by the vaccine court concluded that vaccines aren’t to blame for autism, disappointing thousands of families hoping to win compensation and others who remain convinced of a connection.
But the vaccine court still must rule on additional cases that argue that vaccines with thimerosal are to blame, if the mercury reached and damaged brain cells.
The case, to be argued in the fall, is Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, 09-152.
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McCain Withdraws Support of Supplement Legislation
March 10, 2010 by JP
Filed under Government, Health
March 10, 2010
Wall Street Journal
NEW YORK (Dow Jones)–Shares of nutritional supplement makers climbed Monday as Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz) withdrew his support for legislation to regulate dietary supplements.
“It looks like it will be an easier world to be in the dietary supplement business,” said Avondale analyst Bret Jordan. “The bill would have significantly tightened regulatory requirements.”
In February, McCain and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D., N.D.) introduced the Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010 to give the U.S. Food and Drug Administration more power to oversee the dietary supplement …
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Banned But Still Considered Safe?
March 10, 2010
Mercola.com
By Dr. Mercola
A livestock drug banned in 160 nations and responsible for hyperactivity, muscle breakdown and 10 percent mortality in pigs has been approved by the FDA.
The beta agonist ractopamine, a repartitioning agent that increases protein synthesis, was recruited for livestock use when researchers found the drug, used in asthma, made mice more muscular.
Ractopamine is started as the animal nears slaughter.
How does a drug marked, “Not for use in humans. Individuals with cardiovascular disease should exercise special caution to avoid exposure. Use protective clothing, impervious gloves, protective eye wear, and a NIOSH-approved dust mask” become “safe” in human food? With no washout period?
The drug is banned in Europe, Taiwan and China, and more than 1,700 people have been “poisoned” from eating pigs fed the drug since 1998, but ractopamine is used in 45 percent of U.S. pigs and 30 percent of ration-fed cattle.
Click here for the full report including Dr. Mercola’s comments on the above.
Vitamin D is the Key!
March 10, 2010
Chicago Tribune
By Julie Deardorff
As far as Dr. Joseph Mercola is concerned, vitamin D is the magic bullet we’ve all been looking for. A lack of this wonder nutrient, the controversial natural health advocate said, can set the stage for no fewer than 33 disorders, including autism, cancer, diabetes and infertility.
“Vitamin D appears to reduce your risk of dying from virtually ANY disease,” he wrote on his popular Web site. His recommendation? Get more sun, relax in a tanning bed or try supplements such as “Sunshine Mist,” a vitamin D spray he sells.
Long ignored and feared in high doses, vitamin D is being hailed as the answer to nearly every health issue under the sun. The excitement stems from a flurry of preliminary studies finding links between vitamin D deficiencies and various illnesses, and this summer the federal Institute of Medicine plans to announce revised recommendations regarding dietary intake of vitamin D and calcium that almost certainly will be higher.
Despite the scientific attention being paid to vitamin D, experts caution that claims of wide-ranging health benefits are not yet supported by clinical evidence.
Though D is thought to hold tremendous promise, we’ve been down this garden path before: Hopes for the powers of vitamin E, beta carotene, antioxidant vitamins, selenium and other nutrients collapsed under the weight of rigorous, randomized clinical trials.
“It’s premature to go out and make a big deal out of vitamin D supplementation when we don’t have the evidence,” said endocrinologist Anastassios Pittas, co-director of the Diabetes Center at Tufts University Medical Center in Boston. “We’ve been burned before on nutrition-based interventions,” he said.
Yet already, bread, pasta, orange juice and soy foods are being fortified with vitamin D, and sales of vitamin D supplements grew 116.5 percent, from $108 million to $234 million, from 2007 to 2008, according to Nutrition Business Journal estimates.
The body naturally makes the vitamin when the sun’s ultraviolet rays hit the skin, but fear of health risks and modern lifestyles have limited sun exposure for many.
Mercola, a non-practicing osteopathic physician who owns a clinic in Hoffman Estates, is one of the nutrient’s most public and ardent supporters, with an evangelical style that can grate on the nerves of more cautious physicians.
Unlike most doctors, Mercola recommends universal baseline testing and widespread high-dose supplementation. “I’ve been preaching about this for a long time,” said Mercola, who started his campaign 10 years ago. “Eventually the evidence comes out.”
Mercola said children should get almost six times the amount of vitamin D recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics, while adults and pregnant women should be receiving 5,000 International Units, or IUs, per day.
Most leading vitamin D researchers recommend no more than 1,000 to 2,000 IUs a day, citing insufficient evidence for higher doses. The federal guidelines, which are widely considered to be woefully inadequate, range from 200 to 600 IUs, depending on age.
“Dr. Mercola popularizes and promotes vitamin D in a very passionate way,” said Dr. Gregory Plotnikoff, a senior consultant at the Center for Healthcare Innovation in Minneapolis who is conducting vitamin D trials. Mercola’s high dosing recommendations “may be correct, but we need supportive data,” he said.
Still, Plotnikoff and other researchers have high hopes for the vitamin, saying it could prove to be the single most cost-effective medical intervention in the U.S. today.
Best known for preventing rickets in children — the reason it is added to milk — vitamin D shines most in the role of absorbing calcium, which we need to form bones. A deficiency of vitamin D can contribute to osteoporosis by reducing calcium absorption.
Unlike vitamin E and others, vitamin D is a potent steroid hormone that has receptors in most, if not all, cells of the body. Mounting evidence suggests the so-called sunshine vitamin may also influence conditions unrelated to the skeleton, including cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, autoimmune disorders and mortality, said Dr. Michael Hollick, director of the Vitamin D, Skin and Bone Research Laboratory at Boston University School of Medicine.
“Vitamin D is as important for every cell in the body as thyroid hormone, estrogen and testosterone,” said Plotnikoff. “These hormones turn on and off genes in our DNA. At least 1,000 key genes are under at least partial control by vitamin D. This was never the case for vitamin C, E and others.”
Though observational studies have found a link between low vitamin D levels and an increased risk of disease, such an association doesn’t prove a deficiency caused the problem. Low levels of D could also be a consequence of the illness.
The results of studies can also be skewed by the people participating (vitamin D trial subjects are disproportionately white) or if the research does not account for sunlight exposure or consumption of D in foods. The doses studied are sometimes too low, experts said.
When Pittas and his colleagues systematically reviewed studies on vitamin D’s effect on Type 2 diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease, for example, they found “no clinically significant effects at the dosages given,” according to the research published last week in the Annals of Internal Medicine. They called the vitamin a “promising but unproven” new factor in cardiometabolic disease management.
“There’s a potentially large problem with leaping from observational studies to making decisions about interventions,” said Dr. Ethan Balk, associate director of the Center for Clinical Evidence Synthesis at Tufts Medical Center, a co-author of the Annals study.
“Advocates take the studies and say, ‘If we can move someone’s vitamin D from low to high, the risk would go down.’ While that might be the case, there may be another explanation,” said Balk.
In some ways, it’s much easier to study drugs than nutrients because “everyone starts a pharmaceutical study at the same point, namely … zero,” said Plotnikoff. “In contrast, everyone starts a nutritional study with baseline measurements all over the map. Everyone is given the same dose as if one size fits all. This is a huge mistake.”
Drug effects, meanwhile, tend to be immediate, focused and measureable, while vitamins may have long-term, subtle effects.
Proponents also may oversell the study findings. Mercola’s Web site, for example, recently headlined an item on a new study this way: “Vitamin D fights Crohn’s disease.” But the lead researcher, Dr. John White of the Research Institute of McGill University Health Center in Montreal, said the data came from a lab study that “will have to be borne out in the clinic, which may be tricky.”
“Data is coming, but there’s a good reason to be skeptical — people have been on this bandwagon before,” said White, an endocrinologist. “When it gets into the clinic, it often doesn’t work out quite as well.”
The debate over optimal amounts of vitamin D and how to get it, meanwhile, is ongoing and likely will not be settled by the new National Institutes of Health guidelines.
But one thing is clear: Vitamin D levels are lower than they were 20 years ago. Most Americans, especially those with dark skin, are likely deficient — the result, some say, of widespread campaigns for sunscreen use and sun avoidance, as well as smog and cloud cover, living indoors and rising national trends of inactivity and obesity.
Cardiologist Diane Wallis is one doctor who will continue to test her patients’ vitamin D levels, even though it’s an unproven treatment in her field. “We’re at the threshold,” said Wallis, of Midwest Heart Specialists in Downers Grove, who 10 years ago began seeing female patients with chest pain but no obvious signs of heart trouble. When she tested them, they all had one thing in common: low vitamin D levels. “When I started it we’d just gotten off the whole vitamin E fiasco and people thought I was crazy,” she said. “Anything that had the word ‘vitamin’ led to derision. But no one is making fun of it anymore.”
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Government Warning Planned for Baby Slings
March 10, 2010
Google News
By Associated Press
The U.S. government is preparing a safety warning about baby slings — those popular and fashionable infant carriers that parents can sling around their chests to carry their baby.
The concern is that infants can suffocate, and a few have.
Consumer Product Safety Commission Chairman Inez Tenenbaum says her agency is getting ready to issue a general warning to the public, likely to go out this week, about the baby carriers.
She did not single out any specific slings or discuss at least seven reported deaths linked to them.
Safety advocates have cautioned that some slings, where the baby falls into a curved or “C-like” position inside the sling, can lead to suffocation by restricting the baby’s breathing.
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Bone Strengthening Drug Linked to Fractures
March 10, 2010
ABC News
By Christine Romo and Lara Salahi
Sandy Potter, 59 of Queens, New York, was jumping rope with neighborhood children when she felt her thigh bone snap.
“I went up in the air and I came straight down to the ground,” Potter said. “The pain was excruciating.”
Potter, who was diagnosed with osteoporosis at age 48, had been taking the popular osteoporosis drug Fosamax for eight years before her femur literally snapped in two.
Fosamax, one in a class of drugs called bisphosphonates, is supposed to make bones stronger. But now there’s mounting evidence that for some women, taking Fosamax or its generic alendronate for more than five years could cause spontaneous fractures.
“We are seeing people just walking, walking down the steps, patients who are doing low-energy exercise,” said Dr. Kenneth Egol, professor of orthopedic surgery at NYU Langone Medical Center. “Very unusual, the femur is one of the strongest bones in the body.”
Egol said X-rays of some of his patients look more like an injury endured by a car accident than an otherwise minimal fall.
“Over the last 18 months we are seeing this more frequently,” he said.
Sue Heller, 60, of Castle Rock, Colo., had been on Fosamax for almost 10 years. She broke both of her femur bones.
“I’m sure there are a lot of women who have brittle bones right now that maybe are ready to break, and they’re not aware of it,” said Heller. “And my heart aches for them.”
Sales of the popular drug increased when doctors began prescribing it not only to women showing signs of osteoporosis, but also those who were osteopenic, and thus, at risk for the disease. Now some doctors worry that staying on the drug for more than five years can cause some women’s bones to become more brittle.
Weighing the Risks
This is not the first time that many doctors have reported an opposite effect for many people taking the drug. Fosamax has already been linked to severe musculoskeletal pain, as well as to a serious bone-related jaw disease called osteonecrosis.
“In worldwide post-marketing experience with FOSAMAX/FOSAMAX Plus D, rare reports consistent with osteonecrosis of the jaw have been received. Many of these reports lack sufficient clinical details to make definitive assessments and/or are confounded, particularly since a generally accepted definition of ONJ in the general population is unknown,” responded Merck in a written response to the suggested link. “Rare cases of ONJ have also been reported in patients who do not have osteoporosis and who have not taken any bisphosphonate medicines.”
In 2008, the Food and Drug Administration reached out to the pharmaceutical company Merck about the reports of femur fractures. After 16 months, Merck added patients’ reports of femur fractures to the list of possible side effects reported by patients included in the drug’s package insert.
“It took Merck an entire year to respond,” said ABC News senior health and medical editor, Dr. Richard Besser. “Just six words: ‘low energy femoral shaft and subtrochanteric fractures.’”
The FDA has also never made an effort to inform the public or doctors across the country who prescribe bisphosphonates of the possible side effect, said Besser.
Both the FDA and Merck declined ABC News’ request for an interview. The FDA said they are looking into reports of fractures.
“Nothing is more important to Merck than the safety of its medicines,” according to a written statement by Merck to ABC News. A causal relationship between Fosamax and these fractures has not been established, according to Merck.
“The drug companies have to recognize when there is a problem, they have to be up front with the public. If there’s a concern, they have to voice it and at least give everybody a fair chance to look at this carefully,” said Dr. Joseph Lane, orthopedic trauma surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City.
How Much for How Long
Many studies suggest an overall benefit from taking the medication for women who are at risk for osteoperosis. In fact, bisphosphonates can help prevent hip and spine fractures, which for many women may lead to death.
“Normally your bone is constantly being remade,” said Dr. Joseph Lane, chief of metabolic bone disease at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. “These patients don’t remake their bone and they acquire damage, microdamage, the collagen gets altered and we need to rejuvenate the skeleton.”
In 2008, bisphosphonate sales exceeded $3.5 billion according to data from IMS Health. In 2008, over 37 million prescriptions were written for the osteoporosis medications.
While some physicians use bone density scans to help drive their decisions, doctors generally prescribe them to women who are at an increased risk for either osteoporosis or fractures from osteoporosis they already have. A new tool developed by the World Health Organization can determine the risk of having fractures and can help doctors determine which women with osteoporosis should be treated with medications.
Although bisphosphonates are generally recommended for postmenopausal women, research does not indicate how long women should be on the drug. Many doctors now recommend a five-year limit.
“When they are on it for five, six, seven or eight years, they lost their ability to remodel and regenerate their skeleton,” said Lane. “[Some women] are very vulnerable and they will then develop problems of brittle bone.”
Additional time on the medication depends on doctors’ orders, said Besser.
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Most Drug Studies Don’t Help Docs Pick Best Treatment
March 10, 2010
ScientificAmerican.com
By Katherine Harmon
The forward momentum of medical progress is manifest, it could be argued, in the $50 billion spent in 2008 on pharmaceutical research and development in the quest to bring new drugs to market. But little scientific or governmental infrastructure exists to ensure that each new treatment is actually an improvement over existing therapies—and to tease out what therapies are best for which patients.
People facing tough medical decisions, such as cancer patients, often have to work with their doctors to decide what combination of surgery, chemotherapies, radiation, lifestyle changes or other treatments will likely be the most effective choice. The array of options can be dizzying and most patients, and even some doctors, are ill-prepared to do the background research to glean an answer. And in many cases there is often no data available that compares the effectiveness of various drugs and other treatment options.
Support for this sort of work, known as comparative effectiveness research (or CER, which is defined by the federal government as comparison of “the benefits and harms of different interventions and strategies to prevent, diagnose, treat and monitor health conditions”), has begun to spread from sectors of the scientific world into the public and political realms—thanks in part to health care reform debates and $1.1 billion in funds from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
But a new review of recent literature reveals that medical research has shied away from direct comparisons of therapies. In fact, less than a third of recent studies published in the top six medical journals could be classified as CER, according to the new report, published in the March 10 edition of JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association.
Comparative assessment might not be as sexy as discovering the next blockbuster drug—and is not likely to ever supplant development—but it is a crucial aspect of patient care. “As we develop more and more treatments, it’s important that we know we can use them in an effective, rational way,” says Michael Hochman of the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California and lead author of the report. He found that many of the published studies failed to assess “what we considered to be fundamental therapeutic decisions.”
The knowledge gap between new discoveries and best treatments “is frustrating for patients, who too often undergo trial and error medicine,” Patrick Conway and Carolyn Clancy, both of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), wrote in an editorial accompanying the new study. “The United States leads the world in biomedical science,” they noted, but it “now must implement a framework for research that advances patient-centered care”—care that is based not just on more options but a better understanding of these options, they asserted.
Comparing the comparative
When a new treatment hits the market, it is often accompanied by a wave of promotion (aimed toward doctors—and sometimes patients themselves) in addition to the trial results published before approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But what is often missing is formal, scientific research about how that new treatment compares with existing ones, the authors of the new report discovered.
After assessing studies published between June 2008 and September 2009 in the six most-cited medical journals (Annals of Internal Medicine, Archives of Internal Medicine, the British Medical Journal (BMJ), JAMA, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine), Hochman and his co-author Danny McCormick (of the Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School) found a paucity of solid comparative effectiveness studies.
For the sake of clarifying the often-murky field of CER, the two researchers focused only on research that evaluated medications. Of the 328 studies that purported to do this, 104 met the formal definition of CER from the HHS’s Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. Among the 104 studies, 43 percent compared two or more medications with each other, 16 percent examined different dosing approaches, and 11 percent compared medications with nonpharmacologic treatments.
“We found that only a minority of medication research focuses on helping doctors use them in an effective, rational way,” Hochman says. “The rest of research seems to be devoted to finding novel therapies.”
Two percent of the studies evaluated cost effectiveness and 19 percent focused on medication safety, which, notes Hochman, “probably isn’t enough.”
Hochman and McCormick also found that even those studies that qualified as CER had some “serious shortcomings,” Hochman notes. Part of that might be the nebulous nature of CER itself. Although the term CER has been around for years, the Federal Coordinating Council only established the working definition in June 2009, when the papers reviewed for this new study had already been either published or submitted to journals. “It’s actually relatively difficult to define studies that are CER—it’s sort of a gray area,” Conway says, noting that he still thought the new report was “a good overview and estimation of the CER literature.”
To continue reading this report, click here.
Tainted Ingredient Sold After Salmonella Found
March 10, 2010
Wall Street Journal
By Jared A. Favole
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.
The inspectors noted that “light-brown residue” and “dark-brown liquid” was observed on or around where Basic Food makes flavor-enhancing ingredients used in foods. The inspectors said brown residue was also found in a plastic pipe used in making food ingredients.
Basic Food makes a flavor enhancer called hydrolyzed vegetable protein, or HVP. The FDA report said the company first learned salmonella was present at its processing facility for HVP on Jan. 21. The company continued to distribute the ingredients until Feb. 15. A representative for the company wasn’t immediately available to comment. The company hasn’t responded to earlier requests for comment.
No illnesses have been reported related to the recall, said FDA spokeswoman Rita Chappelle.
FDA and other health officials have said the risk of people getting sick from products containing the HVP is low because the flavor enhancer generally makes up less than 1% of all the ingredients in a food. The FDA also said cooking some products before consuming them may kill the salmonella.
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Study Claims People Could Lose 5lbs a Year with Junk Food Tax
March 10, 2010
ABC News
By Kristina Fiore
Taxing junk food may help reduce obesity and improve health, researchers have found.
Patients got significantly less of their calories from soda or pizza when there was a 10 percent increase in the price of either, Penny Gordon-Larsen of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues reported in the March 8 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.
“Policies aimed at altering the price of soda or … pizza may be effective mechanisms to steer U.S. adults toward a more healthful diet and help reduce long-term weight gain or insulin levels over time,” the researchers wrote.
Talk of a soda tax has sparked debate across the country, particularly in New York and Philadelphia, where such legislation is currently under consideration. However, not much research has been done to study how price changes would affect health outcomes.
So the researchers looked at data from 5,115 patients enrolled in the longitudinal Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study from 1985 to 2006.
During that time, the inflation-adjusted price of soda and pizza actually decreased, with the largest drop observed for soda, falling from $2.71 to $1.42 for a 2-liter bottle — a 48 percent decline.
In their analyses, the researchers found that changes in the price of soda and pizza were associated with changes in the probability of consuming those foods, as well as in the amounts consumed.
A 10 percent increase in the price of soda was associated with a 7.12 percent decrease in calories consumed from it, while the same increase in the price of pizza led to an 11.5 percent drop.
Price was also significantly associated with total caloric intake and body weight. A $1.00 increase in soda prices, for example, was tied to a mean of 124 fewer total daily calories, which amounted to an average weight loss of 2.34 pounds.
The researchers noted that similar trends were seen for pizza, adding that a $1.00 increase in the price of both soda and pizza together was associated with even greater changes in total energy intake, body weight, and insulin resistance.
“Our results provide stronger evidence to support the potential health benefits of taxing selected foods and beverages,” they wrote. “Similar taxation policies have proven a successful means of effectively reducing adult and teenage smoking.”
They calculated that an 18 percent tax on junk food would result in a 56-calorie decline in total daily energy intake. At the population level, that would translate to about five pounds per patient per year, along with significant reductions in the risks of most obesity-related chronic diseases, they said.
Since their study looked at only a small number of foods, they called upon researchers to assess more in future studies.
In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Mitchell H. Katz and Dr. Rajiv Bhatia of the San Francisco Department of Public Health wrote that taxing is “an appropriate method of correcting for health and other social costs not accounted for in the private market cost.”
However, they added, in addition to taxing unhealthy foods, policymakers should consider ways to reward healthy behaviors.
“Sadly, we are currently subsidizing the wrong things, including the production of corn, which makes the corn syrup in sweetened beverages so inexpensive,” they wrote. U.S. agricultural subsidies should instead “be used to make healthful foods such as locally grown vegetables, fruits, and whole grains less expensive.”
“In the end,” Katz and Bhatia concluded, “putting our money where our mouth is means aligning our economic incentives so that we always serve up the healthful choice.”
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Men Outlive Women Sexually
March 10, 2010
WebMd.com
By Jennifer Warner
Good health may not only help you live longer, but it could also help you enjoy a longer, more satisfying sex life.
A new study shows people who are in good health are nearly twice as likely to be interested in sex in middle and older age and also more likely to report having a busy and satisfying sex life.
Researchers say sexual activity has long been associated with health benefits and longevity, but this is the first study to look at how general health affects the quality of sex as people age and calculate what they call a person’s “sexually active life expectancy.”
Using information gathered from more than 6,000 men and women in midlife and later life, researchers estimate that at age 55, the average sexually active life expectancy is 15 years for men and 10.6 years for women.
“Although the period is longer for men, they lose more years of sexually active life as a result of poor health than women,” write researcher Stacy Tessler Lindau, associate professor at the University of Chicago, and colleagues in the journal BMJ.
But the gender disparities don’t stop there.
“Overall, the study found that men have a longer sexually active life expectancy and that most sexually active men report a good quality sex life. In contrast, only about half of sexually active women reported a good quality sex life,” write the researchers. “This disparity, and its implication for health, requires further exploration.”
Other findings of the study include:
At the age of 30, men have a sexually active life expectancy of nearly 35 years; women, almost 31 years. At 55, this average sexual life expectancy changes to almost 15 remaining years for men and 10 years for women.
By age 75, 17% of women and 39% of men were sexually active. But for those with a partner, these gender differences were much smaller.
About two-thirds of sexually active middle-aged men and women reported having a good-quality sex life. But only five out of 10 older women reported a good-quality sex life, compared with seven out of 10 older men.
Older men were three times as likely to be interested in sex as older women (62% vs. 21%).
People in very good health were 1.5 to 1.8 times more likely to report an interest in sex than those in poorer health.
Among those who were sexually active, good health was also associated with more frequent sex (once or more weekly) in men and with a good-quality sex life in men and women.
In an editorial that accompanies the study, Patricia Goodson, a professor at Texas University, says the news that adults in the U.S. can enjoy many years of sexual activity beyond age 55 is promising.
“Despite the spotlight this study shines on the sexual health of older adults in the US, less good news lies dormant in the shadows,” writes Goodson. “Take the gender gap in sexually active life expectancy, for instance, which favours men: for men at age 55, sexually active life expectancy was eight to nine years less than demographic life expectancy, whereas for women this difference was 17 to 18 years.”
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