ABC News(NEW YORK) -- Environmental activist Erin Brockovich has corrected misinformation regarding her investigation into the medical mystery in an upstate New York town where a group of teenagers has displayed symptoms similar to Tourette syndrome, saying that her research is still preliminary.
Nearly two dozen people, including one 36-year-old, in the upstate New York village of LeRoy are now experiencing uncontrollable tics, seizures and outbursts that might have been caused by a chemical spill in the town more than 40 years ago.
In a statement released Tuesday, Brockovich said she is still investigating a plume from a 1970 train derailment in LeRoy, which dumped cyanide and trichloroethylene (TCE) -- a chlorinated hydrocarbon used to de-grease metal parts -- within three miles of the village's high school.
The Environmental Protection Agency says that TCE can affect the central nervous system, and cause dizziness, headache, sleepiness, nausea, confusion, blurred vision and facial numbness. It is suspected of being linked to the symptoms among LeRoy's local teens.
Brockovich associate Bob Bowcock reportedly said on Feb. 11 that samples taken from the wells of private residences had not migrated west and south -- toward LeRoy High School -- as some had feared. Although at the time Browcock said that the investigation would continue for the next several months, Brockovich on Tuesday said that the tests he referred to were preliminary.
"Contrary to an erroneous news report, I want to make clear that my investigation into possible sources of environmental contamination in LeRoy, New York that may or may not be linked to the serious illnesses suffered by various members of the community is not complete," Brockovich said in a statement. "In fact, it appears the number of people in the area displaying alarming health issues that can be caused by TCE is growing."
"It took the EPA 40 years to investigate the contamination from the train derailment and it will take us more than 40 days to get to the root of the problem in LeRoy. I want to further stress that we have not ruled out the TCE plume from the train derailment as a source of contamination at LeRoy High School," she added.
Brockovich, 51, added that her team has many more areas of LeRoy to test, including the local quarry, six fracking wells at the high school and the Methyl tert-butyl ether (MtBE) contamination in local wells, while stressing that thoroughness is key in her investigation.
iStockphoto/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- Men and women who shoehorn themselves into skin-tight jeans, battle to button their trousers or knot their neckties too tightly might unknowingly suffer nerve damage, digestive disturbances and even potentially deadly blood clots.
They're victims of fashion's hidden health hazards. Even some favorite accessories, like waist-cinching belts, can compress delicate nerves in the abdomen or constrain breathing and deprive the heart and brain of needed oxygen.
"Who hasn't tried to squeeze into a too-small pair of shoes, or wriggle into too-tight jeans?" said Dr. Orly Avitzur, a neurologist in Tarrytown, N.Y., who started warning about too-constricting skinny jeans on her Consumer Reports blog back in 2009. "Sometimes we realize right away that our choice of wardrobe or fashion is the culprit; other times, it only dawns on us when we begin to really suffer."
When patients seek medical help for pain radiating into the thigh, or feelings of numbness or tingling, it's unlikely they suspect that the cut of their jeans might be the problem. But sharp-eyed physicians like Dr. Malvinder S. Parmar, medical director of Timmins & District Hospital in Ontario, Canada, might recognize the hallmarks of meralgia paresthetica, the compression of a nerve running from the pelvis into the outer thigh.
In 2003, Parmar published a description of "tingly thighs" in three "mildly obese" women who wore low-rise jeans throughout the previous few months. Their discomforts resolved after four to six weeks "avoiding hiphuggers and wearing loose-fitting dresses," according to Parmar's 2003 correspondence in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
Some clothing-related maladies go by mundane-sounding names that hardly hint at their potential to sicken. For example, a middle-aged or older man whose belly hangs below the waist of his pants may suffer from "tight pants syndrome," a term coined in a 1993 article by Dr. Octavio Bessa, an internist in Stamford, Conn.
Bessa described a collection of gastrointestinal symptoms including abdominal pain, heartburn and reflux a few hours after meals that he would see in 20 to 25 men every year. The common thread: All wore ill-fitting pants with waistbands several inches smaller than their bellies, Bessa reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Three years later, two diagnostic imaging specialists from Wales described a "sporting variant" of tight-pants syndrome that they linked to tight Neoprene bike shorts worn to prevent muscular injury.
Wearing tight neckties and shirts with constricting collars can also impede blood flow through neck veins and arteries and may affect vision. In a 2003 study of 40 men, half with glaucoma, three minutes with a tightened tie raised eye pressure among the majority of those with and without the disease. Elevated eye pressure is a key element of diagnosing and monitoring glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness.
David De Lossy/Thinkstock(LOS ANGELES) -- Women with a history of endometriosis are at a significantly increased risk of developing several types of ovarian cancers, according to a new study published in Lancet Oncology.
Endometriosis occurs when the cells from the lining of the uterus grow in other areas of the body, according to the National Institutes of Health. About 10 percent of women in their childbearing years experience it. It can cause pain and irregular bleeding and make it difficult to conceive.
The new research found that women with endometriosis have a three times higher risk of developing clear-cell ovarian cancer (which accounts for less than five percent of all ovarian cancer cases) and twice the risk of developing endometrioid tumors.
"Our data, taken with the other published data on the link between ovarian cancer and endometriosis strongly suggests a causal relationship, with endometriosis being a precursor lesion for these three types of ovarian cancer," Dr. Celeste Leigh Pearce, lead author of the study and a preventive medicine researcher at the University of Southern California, told ABC News.
Researchers analyzed the link between endometriosis and ovarian cancer rates from data compiled by the Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium, a forum of investigators of case-control studies on the cancer. Tuesday's published study included data from more than 23,000 women with ovarian cancer.
"This excellent study brings home the point to all primary care physicians that women with endometriosis, surgically proven or self-reported by symptoms, deserve to have available all options to limit this ectopic endometrial growth," said Dr. Diane Harper, director of the Gynecologic Cancer Prevention Research Group at the University of Missouri-Kansas.
A woman with a mother or sister with endometriosis is significantly more likely to contract endometriosis than other women, according to the NIH. Other risks of developing the condition include beginning menstruating at an early age, never having children and frequent and long-lasting periods. The most telling sign of endometriosis is pain -- during and before menstruation, sexual intercourse, and found in the abdomen, lower back and pelvic area.
While this is not the first time that a link between endometriosis and ovarian cancer has been studied, Dr. Mark Einstein, director of gynecologic oncology at Montefiore Medical Center, said the combining of studies offers a better understanding of the strength of the association between endometriosis and ovarian cancers.
Authors warned that most women who suffer from endometriosis never develop ovarian cancers, but the findings should alert patients and physicians of the high risks.
Dr. Diane Yamada of the Society for Gynecologic Oncology Communications Committee said that while the study should not be a cause of alarm for women with endometriosis, the research "may allow for an opportunity to identify symptoms associated with another disease process, which may help identify these patients."
Recent studies have even found that ultrasounds and blood tests intended to screen for ovarian cancer actually did more harm than good by undergoing unnecessary follow-up treatments and surgeries. At this point, Yamda said it would be a "leap of faith" to recommend that women should undergo rigorous screening, but the information offers new clues on how and who to screen to prevent the cancer, which causes about 15,000 American deaths each year, according to the American Cancer Society.
Stockbyte/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- Talk about adding insult to injury. More and more U.S. emergency rooms won't admit patients until they pony up a fee of $100 dollars or more for non-emergencies.
The fees are meant to discourage people suffering from nothing worse, say, than a sore throat or a skinned knee from taking up time and resources better reserved for the seriously ill.
Both for-profit and non-profit hospitals are levying the charge.
Ed Fishbough, spokesman for the nation's biggest for-profit chain, HCA Healthcare in Nashville, Tenn., says the company first started imposing such fees in 2004, at one of its Houston-area hospitals.
The practice has since spread to 76 other hospitals in the 163-hospital chain. The purpose, he says, is to "help reduce crowding in the ER and to educate people about appropriate use of ER resources."
Critics of ER fees include the American College of Emergency Physicians, which says that two to seven percent of patients determined to have non-emergency conditions are admitted to a hospital within 24 hours.
Patient advocacy groups, likewise, blast the policy, saying it discourages the sick from seeking help. "It seems the point of the policy is to put a financial barrier between the patient and care," Anthony Wright, executive director of advocacy group Health Access California, told Kaiser.
Either way, here's how it works at HCA:
You show up at the ER wanting treatment. A clinician checks you out, and decides whether your case qualifies as a true emergency. If it doesn't, but if you want to stay in the ER and get treated there anyway, you are asked to pay a fee, which at HCA runs between $100 and $150.
Pregnant women, children younger than 6 and people older than 64 are exempt.
HCA says it had six million emergency room visits at its hospitals last year. Of those, 314,000 (about five percent) were from people who, after screening, were determined not to have an emergency condition. They were offered the choice of paying the fee and remaining in the ER for treatment, or leaving and seeking treatment at what HCA calls a "more appropriate setting," such as a clinic or doctor's office. About 233,000 patients chose to stay and pay. About 80,000 didn't, and took a hike. It's unknown where they ended up.
Such ER fees are common now at other big, for-profit chains (including Health Management Associates of Florida, and Community Health Systems of Tennessee) and nonprofit hospitals, as well.
Tomi Galin, vice president for corporate communications at Community Health Systems, says patients who choose to leave "are provided with information about other community health resources for their non-emergency medical conditions." Imposing a fee, she argues, helps reduce costs for the patient and the hospital alike because "the ER is the highest cost environment to receive non-emergency care."
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says patients with non-urgent problems account for about eight percent of ER visits. Other studies have put the figure considerably higher. One by Health Affairs policy journal in 2010 concluded it was closer to 27 percent.
The non-profit Midland Memorial Hospital in Texas implemented a $150 ER fee in 2009, as part of an exercise in cost-control, according to a Kaiser Health News story. Kaiser says the hospital had lost $14 million in 2008, in part because of millions of dollars in ER bills left unpaid.
Since imposing its fee, the hospital has seen a drop in debt, according to its chief financial officer, whom Kaiser quotes. He estimates that about 75 percent of patients with nonemergency conditions leave the hospital rather than pay the fee. "More people now know," he says, "that our ER is not a walk-in clinic or a primary-care office."
iStockphoto/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved new suppliers for two cancer drugs Tuesday in an effort to curb the largest nationwide drug shortage in nearly a decade.
The FDA said its approval of a new supply method would increase production of the injection form of the drug methotrexate, which is used to treat children with the most common form of childhood leukemia.
The agency also said it would allow temporary foreign imports of the cancer drug Lipodux, an alternative to the drug doxorubicin, sold under the name Doxil, which is used to treat ovarian cancer, multiple myeloma and AIDS-related Kaposi's sarcoma. Temporary foreign importation is a rare move for the agency.
"In different circumstances we have to apply different tools," said FDA Commissioner Peggy Hamburg in a statement, adding that the quality of the drug was evaluated by the agency before its temporary approval.
The FDA's actions follow President Obama's executive order issued in October 2011 to reduce the dire drug shortage. The order instructed the FDA to broaden its reporting of potential drug shortages, expedite regulatory reviews that can help prevent shortages and investigate whether potential shortages have led to price gouging.
The drug shortage has compromised or delayed care for some patients and may have led to otherwise preventable deaths, say many oncologists.
All five pharmaceutical companies that make the injection drug methotrexate, which treats acute lymphoblastic leukemia by slowing the growth of cancer cells, have either slowed or stopped manufacturing of the drug, according to the FDA. The companies have blamed shortages on high demand or manufacturing delays.
Drug manufacturers APP Pharmaceuticals and Hospira Inc. announced at the press briefing Tuesday that within four to six weeks, both companies would have made enough methotrexate, including the preservative-free form, to meet the nationwide demand.
Next week Hospira plans to release 34,000 vials of methotrexate, or a month's supply of the drug, Michael Ball, CEO of Hospira Inc., told reporters at Tuesday's briefing.
According to Michael Link, a pediatric oncologist and president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, some hospital pharmacies reported having only a couple of weeks of supplies left.
Many oncologists are especially worried about the shortage of the preservative-free form of methotrexate, which is considered less toxic.
Only the preservative-free methotrexate can be injected into the spinal fluid of cancer patients to prevent the spread and recurrence of the disease.
"There are couple other drugs that can be injected into the spinal fluid, but none that are as effective," said Link. "As for the high dose version of the drug, there's no workaround for it."
Digital Vision/Thinkstock(VANCOUVER, British Columbia) -- New research is proving that humans are naturally pretty nice with “pro-social tendencies” and are not as “nasty” as previously thought, according to a top primate behavior expert.
Frans de Waal, a biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that new research was helping to challenge earlier beliefs -- popular until more than a decade ago -- that humans were competitive, aggressive and plain-old mean, according to the Discovery Channel.
He showed videos from laboratories of a monkey displaying emotional distress after being denied a treat that another had received as well as a rat turning down a snack to help another rat escape from a trap.
De Waal, the author of The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, said the new research revealed that animals were naturally capable of “reciprocity, fairness, empathy and consolation.”
He told the audience in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Monday that human children and most higher animals, such as primates and elephants, are “moral” because they need to cooperate with each other to reproduce and pass on their genes, the Discovery Channel reported.
But he told reporters that animals empathized with those within their “in group” but that courtesy was not so easily extended in the human world.
ABC News(MEMPHIS, Tenn.) -- David Andrews plays for his freshman basketball team at Germantown High School outside of Memphis.
He wears the number 40. He leads the pregame chant. He swishes threes. And he has Down syndrome.
When Andrews’ mother, Maureen, asked coach Wes Crump if her son could be part of the team that his brother was already on, the coach immediately agreed. But she never expected to see her son practice, let alone play.
“Maureen wasn’t asking for anything other than David maybe getting a sweatsuit, team shoes, and for him to be on the bench with the team,” Crump told ABC News.
What Crump and the team soon realized was Andrews, 18, was going to have a bigger impact than anyone could have imagined. Andrews started participating in practice and during the team’s fourth game he took to the court to chants from the crowd of “We want David! We want David!”
“During the first offensive play, David ran down the left side of the floor into the deep corner. Our point guard passed David the ball, and without hesitating, he shot. Swish!” Crump wrote. “From that game on, it seemed our team had a new goal of getting so far ahead of the other team, that David would have an opportunity to play some minutes.”
Fortunately for Andrews, the Red Devil’s were more than pretty good. They lost only one game all season and he was able to play quite a bit.
Crump said Andrews has put the game into perspective for him. One time after he received a technical foul going into halftime, Andrews’ antics during warmups prior to the second half lifted his mood.
Andrews was hitting shot after shot from the top of the key and the crowd took notice.
“The CBHS parents were applauding his every basket,” Crump told ABC News. “David turned to the stands every time they applauded and flexed for them. As I watched that exchange, I realized just how little the game meant, and how much David means to me and to the people who get to be around him. It completely changed my attitude. I sat there and just smiled.”
File photo. Hemera/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- Tami Kemit thought she was coming down with the flu, but the 35-year-old mother of two was actually having a massive heart attack.
Kemit, who lives in Erie, Pa., waited three days before she drove herself to the hospital, where she hoped doctors would give her something for her flu symptoms. Instead, they cut open her chest and performed a triple bypass.
"I had no idea I was having a heart attack," said Kemit. "I'd had only ever seen my father have a heart attack, and he was always grabbing his chest. I had no pain in my chest."
Although chest pain or discomfort is the most common heart attack symptom, fatigue, nausea, shortness of breath and pain or numbness in the jaw, arms or back can also signal a blocked artery cutting off vital oxygen and nutrients from the heart. And according to a new study of more than one million heart attack patients, women under 55 are less likely to seek medical attention for those atypical symptoms and more likely to die in a hospital from a heart attack than men of the same age.
"Young women who have atypical symptoms might not appreciate that they're in fact having a heart attack and may be more likely to delay treatment," said Dr. John Canto, a cardiologist at the Watson Clinic in Lakeland, Fla., and lead author of the study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "They think it's the flu or stress or a pinched nerve, and they don't want to come in to the hospital only to have doctors tell them it's nothing serious. But we should all err on the side of caution."
Kemit, now 46, takes 30 pills a day for heart failure. The drugs, designed to lower her blood pressure and slow her weak heart, have packed weight on her once-fit frame.
"I'm really fat, but I'm still here," said Kemit, whose doctors gave her five years to live 11 years ago.
Since her first heart attack, Kemit has had three more, signaled by a squeezing in her arm, a tingling in her hand and numbness in her jaw. She never had chest pain.
"Less than 20 percent of patients who present to a hospital with typical or atypical symptoms are in fact having a heart attack," said Canto. "But time is muscle and muscle is life. When an artery is blocked, the heart muscle begins to die after 30 to 60 minutes. We call it the golden hour of heart attacks. Every minute you wait after that golden hour, more heart muscle will die. And once you lose it, it's not coming back."
Dr. Malissa Wood, spokeswoman for the American Heart Association and co-director of Massachusetts General Hospital's Corrigan Women's Heart Health Program, said women tend to look out for the hearts of others more so than their own.
"I think women tend to worry so much about breast cancer, and I understand why," said Wood, who has survived breast cancer herself. "But heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women."
Women should "know their numbers" and risk factors, said Wood. Smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and a family history of heart disease raise the risk of heart attack.
"The more risk factors you have, the more you really need to pay attention when symptoms strike out of the blue," she said. "It's rare for young women to have a heart attack, but the results can be devastating."
Keith Brofsky/Thinkstock(TORONTO) -- People often get plastic surgery hoping to take the years off, but a new study gives an idea of just how many years they might be able to take off.
More extensive facial surgery predicted a younger estimated age for patients after their operations, according to researchers from the University of Toronto. Overall, patients looked an average of about 9 years younger than their chronological age after surgery, in the opinion of raters who compared before-and-after pictures.
The more procedures a patient had, the greater the difference between estimates of their age before and after surgery, according to the results of the study published in the Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery. The effect was, "unrelated to the preoperative age of a patient and unaffected by other variables that we investigated," the study's authors wrote.
Dr. Julius Few, founder of the Few Institute for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery in Chicago, said the report confirms what he has seen with his own practice.
"I believe it is a study that adds objective confirmation to what was already known to be associated with facial rejuvenation surgery," Few told ABC News.
Patients often go to plastic surgeons wanting to look younger, and doctors face a delicate task in managing patients' expectations about how young they'll be able to look after surgery. But age and age change after surgery as perceived by others are usually the best barometers of success after facial plastic surgery.
In the study, the researchers used before-and-after photos of 60 patients who had undergone facial cosmetic surgery. All the patients were about 60 years old, and all but six were women. Twenty-two patients had a face and neck lift, 17 had a face/neck lift plus an eyelid lift and 22 had a face/neck lift, eyelid lift and a forehead lift.
The researchers showed patient photos to a group of 40 first-year medical students, asking them to estimate the patients' ages before surgery and the perceived change in age after surgery. After averaging the raters' responses, the researchers found that patients who had one surgery, the face and neck lift, looked 5.7 years younger, patients who had two procedures looked 7.5 years younger and after three surgeries, patients looked 8.4 years younger.
"Our findings offer some objective sense as to our success with surgical intervention as facial plastic surgeons and provide us with more evidence to give patients when formulating their preoperative expectations," the authors wrote.
But Dr. Garry Brody, professor of plastic surgery at the University of Southern California, said it's still important for patients to take a realistic approach to how successful their surgery will be and to get surgery for the right reasons.
"Inappropriate motivation and unrealistic expectations will spoil any such surgery," Brody said.
Kraig Scarbinsky/Digital Vision/Thinkstock(VANCOUVER) -- If your toddler is having trouble building her vocabulary, you’ll want steer her toward the word “dog” rather than, say, “aardvark.”
It may be common sense, but now there’s a growing body of scientific research to back it up, says psychology professor Leslie Altman Rescorla.
Rescorla, the director of the Child Study Institute at Bryn Mawr College, presented research on late talkers in the United States and around the world this past weekend in Vancouver, British Columbia, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science‘s annual conference.
Rescorla said that recent studies of children’s language development in Greece, the Netherlands and South Korea echo findings she published in 2001 -- that whether a child is slow to learn language or learns language at an average rate, there are certain commonly used words that she is likely to know. And when working on language intervention for late talkers, Rescorla said, it’s good to focus on such words when building a basic vocabulary.
Based on her own research and that of collaborators in other countries, Rescorcla compiled a list of the 25 most commonly used words and expressions by children at age 2. They are:
-- mommy -- daddy -- baby -- milk -- juice -- hi/hello -- ball -- no -- yes -- dog -- cat -- nose -- eye -- banana -- cookie -- car -- hot -- thank you -- bath -- shoe -- hat -- book -- all gone -- bye bye -- more
Rescorla said children are considered late talkers when they say fewer than 50 words at the age of 24 months. Such delays may be symptomatic of hearing problems, an autism spectrum disorder or another developmental disability.
Her research on children with language delays -- and no other disabilities -- showed that late talkers were, “functioning at the normal range” by about age 4 or 5.
“The important point is they’re not learning language in some very unusual way, they’re just learning it later,” she said.
A long-term study by Rescorla of late talkers in affluent Philadelphia suburbs found that by age 17, the teens’ performance was at or above average, though they still lagged behind the language skills of their privileged peers.
Keith Brofsky/Thinkstock(HOUSTON) -- Doctors tweeting throughout surgery and providing pictures and video is not new, but tweeting during open-heart surgery? That’s happening for the first time Tuesday.
Surgeons at Memorial Hermann Northwest Hospital in Houston are live tweeting a coronary bypass, complete with almost instantaneous YouTube videos and pictures of a beating heart.
Some of the pictures and video are already rolling into the hospital’s Twitter feed, @houstonhospital, but before clicking over, remember that the content is graphic, and includes images of the heart itself.
Dr. Michael Macis is conducting the two-hour bypass, wearing a helmet cam that snaps the photos and video, and sends them to a computer. Another camera in the operating room is also capturing images.
The surgery coincides with Heart Month. Memorial Hermann has arranged for a doctor on its staff to answer questions from the public through CoverItLive, which is embedded here.
Comstock/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) -- Livestock in the United States may be building resistance to deadly bacterial infections, and those superbugs may be easily transferrable to humans, according to a new study published in the journal, mBio.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, is a strain of staph bacteria that does not respond to antibiotics used to treat staph infections. About two out of every 100 people carry this strain of staph, according to the National Institutes of Health, and infections can be minor to severe. The more severe infections occur most frequently in health care settings, according to the CDC, and they can quickly become life-threatening.
In 2003, scientists discovered a strain of the bacteria called ST398, and today, it can be found in pigs, turkeys, cattle and other livestock. The strain, which causes skin and respiratory infections, regularly infects people who handle the livestock.
Now the new genome analysis found that the MRSA strain found in livestock in 2003 likely came from an antibiotic sensitive strain of MRSA in humans.
"Most of the ancestral human strains were sensitive to antibiotics, whereas the livestock strains had acquired resistance on several independent occasions," Ross Fitzgerald in Center for Infectious Diseases at the University of Edinburgh, who reviewed the research, said in a press release.
Once the strain infected livestock, it likely changed into several different types, some of which are resistant to various antibiotics, said Fitzgerald, and it is now a two-way street.
"The overuse of antibiotics in food animals for growth promotion allows for various strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria," said Dr. Marcus Zervos, chief of infectious diseases at Henry Ford Health Systems in Detroit. "If we continue to use antibiotics in food animals, especially for unneeded reasons, the infections will become antibiotic resistant and make their way into people."
Zervos said about 20,000 Americans die each year due to MRSA complications, meaning there are more deaths related to the staph infection than AIDS each year.About 16,000 people in the United States die of AIDS each year, according to the CDC.
The use of antibiotic growth medication has expanded as the meat and livestock industry moved to more mass production. The drugs are added to animal feeds to help the animals grow larger for slaughter, lower the percentage of fat in the livestock and boost protein content. They are also meant to prevent bacteria, including E.coli, Salmonella and enterococci from developing in the animal, but the controversial practice promotes antibiotic resistant bacteria strains to form in the animals' internal systems.
Many experts agree that the United States should follow Europe's lead by banning the feeding of all antibiotics and other drugs in livestock to promote growth. On Jan. 1, 2006, the European Union prohibited such products to prevent antibiotic resistance in humans and in animals.
While bacteria like MRSA in meat is killed once it is cooked at high heat, experts said farm workers and other handlers of the livestock are most at risk of contracting the infection.
"It's pretty unlikely that someone would get MRSA after cooking the meat, but if you don't wash your hands thoroughly after handling the raw meat, there's potential to acquire MRSA," said Dr. William Schaffner, chief of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
Schaffner said he believes there is little likelihood of contracting MRSA from eating meat, but the concern of antibiotic resistance in humans is of great concern, as nationwide sales of antibiotics for humans and animals continues to grow.
Experts said the excessive use of antibiotics in the United States to treat a wide variety of illnesses, including viruses -- which do not respond to antibiotics -- and the overuse of antibiotics in food products may cause continuing resistance to antibiotics.
"These findings are a result of inaction to do something to control antibiotic use in the food animals," Zervos said.
Courtesy ABS Avalanche Rescue Services Inc.(SEATTLE) -- The airbag backpack -- among other snow-safety gadgets -- seem to be getting a second look after an advanced skier credited her device with saving her life this weekend in an avalanche that killed three others. Elyse Saugstad told ABC News that when the avalanche occurred Sunday in Washington State’s Cascade Mountains, “the first thing that came to my mind was to use my airbag device.”
“There’s basically a system where you have a lever on the chest part of the backpack,” she said. “It’s a normal backpack and when you pull the lever. …It deploys the airbags to fill up with air and what it essentially does is, it keeps you above the avalanche.”
Steve Wagner, CEO of ABS Avalanche Rescue Services Inc., the North American branch of the German company that made Saugstad’s backpack, said there was a 97 percent survival rate for those wearing its product.
“It’s the only thing that you can do for yourself when caught in an avalanche,” he told ABC News today.
The backpack costs from $1,000 to $1,200.
The international media reported last week that a companion of Dutch Prince Johan Friso was wearing an ABS airbag when an avalanche overtook his group. Friso was rescued and is in stable but life-threatening condition, according to the Netherlands’ royal information service.
ABS’ founder invented the airbag in 1985 but it has become mainstream in Europe in the past six years. Sales have taken off in North America in the past 24 months, Wagner said. He said professionals have carried the airbags as well as ski patrols and guides at popular ski resorts such as Jackson Hole, Wyo.
“[The reaction] has been very good. There is a growing wave of acceptance in the community that this actually works,” Wagner told ABC News.
In addition to carrying a beacon, probe, shovel and even a helmet, here are other tips from the National Snow and Ice Data Center for surviving an avalanche:
Yell and let go of ski poles. Use swimming motions. If you end up near the surface, stick out an arm or leg so rescuers can find you.
If the snow is over your head, try to make an air pocket in front of your face with your hands and arms. Take a deep breath and hold it or you might not be able to breathe after the snow sets.
Keith Brofsky/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- There are 90,000 people in the United States waiting for a kidney, and all it takes is one stranger to begin a chain of events that has the potential to save an ever-growing number of lives.
Rick Ruzzamenti was the first link in the longest such chain so far -- known in this case as chain No. 124, as The New York Times first reported: a stranger who began a domino effect of generosity spanning across the country.
Ruzzamenti gave his kidney to someone for whom a family member couldn't provide a match. But a family member who was not a match in this circumstance was a match for Brooke Kitzman from Michigan. And so it went, on and on, as strangers bound together through common circumstances gave and received kidneys as part of a chain started by a man who had no specific attachment to the cause.
There was the ex-boyfriend who saved his ex-girlfriend and the old prom dates from Queens, N.Y. -- Gregory Person donated his kidney so Zenovia Duke could get a kidney from Samantha Hendon in Porterville, Calif.
The mastermind behind it all is Garet Hil, a former U.S. Marine with an MBA and his own company, who every day before dawn orchestrates the blood types, the profiles and the logistics of the most three dimensional kidney chain ever tried.
Hil says a singular event inspired him to start a kidney registry: When his then 10-year-old daughter needed a kidney they went through 15 different possible matches until she finally got what she needed.
"We went into all the exchange systems in the United States and never got a match," Hil told ABC News. "When I saw these systems, I thought there needed to be a better way... and that's what drove us to create the National Kidney Registry."
Over the last four months, 17 hospitals and 11 states, Hil's mastery of the system has helped save one life after another until finally the chain ended, setting a record with the 30th transplant, Donald Terry, a 47-year-old government worker.
"I felt myself dying on dialysis when the doctors called me [to say] he had a kidney -- he was going to have a donated kidney," Terry said. "I actually burst down in tears, I didn't know what to say -- I didn't see myself living five more years."
Terry had no idea that the two people watching over him were a former Marine and a stranger who on an impulse decided to become a donor.
"The only thing I can say is we have two kidneys and if you believe in God, you could say well maybe God gave us an extra kidney so that we could give it away," Ruzzamenti said. "Just for a few, a month or two moments of some pain, you can really relieve the suffering of another individual. ... The amount of suffering and pain and discomfort or whatever that I went through is just absolutely nothing for the amount of good that came with it. You know, if I had another kidney, I would donate that one too, no problem."
Peter Dazeley/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- Store aisles, markets, bakeries, blogs and books are stocked with food ideas for going gluten-free. The gluten-free diet has become popular for combating a full-blown gluten allergy known as celiac disease, or more popularly for those with no allergy at all as a means to lose weight and enhance athletic performance.
But researchers say there's a middle ground emerging. A growing number of people now have a type of gluten intolerance called nonceliac gluten sensitivity, which isn't quite as serious as celiac disease but not to be taken lightly either. Mounting evidence now suggests the number of people who have nonceliac gluten sensitivity may outnumber those who have full-blown celiac disease.
Celiac disease is a genetic condition that damages the lining of the small intestine and prevents it from absorbing nutrients from food. The damage is attributed to an autoimmune reaction to eating gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley, rye and possibly oats.
People with celiac disease are diagnosed through specific blood and bowel tests. Those with the disease have a higher risk for anemia, osteoporosis, severe intestinal damage and gastrointestinal cancers.
Unlike celiac disease, gluten sensitivity walks a blurry diagnostic line. There's no definitive way to diagnose the condition like a blood test. The condition is also not associated with as serious side effects and doesn't have the same genetic markers as celiac disease.
"It's been very tough to qualify and classify given that we did not have a clear definition of what it's all about," said Dr. Alessio Fasano, director of the Center for Celiac Research at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
In February, Fasano and more than a dozen international food allergy experts published a consensus report identifying gluten sensitivity as one in a group of gluten spectrum disorders that include wheat allergy and celiac disease.
Sixty million gluten-free products are consumed in the U.S. each day, Fasano said. But the question remains as to how many of these products are consumed out of medical necessity.
What looks like an increase in the number of people reporting gluten sensitivity may stem from an incorrect diagnosis, according to Italian researchers who published a commentary Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Since there are no standard diagnosing criteria for gluten sensitivity, few patients have been properly diagnosed, the researchers wrote.
Common symptoms of gluten sensitivity include abdominal pain similar to irritable bowel syndrome, fatigue, headaches and a "foggy mind." But these symptoms generally improve or disappear after removing gluten from the diet.
iStockphoto/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- Men and women who shoehorn themselves into skin-tight jeans, battle to button their trousers or knot their neckties too tightly might unknowingly suffer nerve damage, digestive disturbances and even potentially deadly blood clots.
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