Sleep in a bed, not while you’re driving.
The next time you’re angered by the sight of a driver speeding down the highway while talking on his cell phone, just think: it could be worse. He could be sleeping.
Stats out from the CDC today show that 4.7% of Americans surveyed reported having nodded off or fully conked out while driving during the previous 30 days. The survey, conducted in 2009, covered 74,571 adults in 12 representative states.
Almost 38% reported unintentionally falling asleep during at least one day in the previous 30. (As
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A flailing U.S. economy has helped push down prices for medical procedures, allowing middle class Canadians who previously couldn’t afford it to head south for heart operations, hip replacements and other procedures.
Open-heart surgery once cost upwards of $100,000 in the United States, but a triple bypass can now be had for as little as $16,000 U.S. And there are bargains on hip and knee replacements too: the going rate of $53,000 can be negotiated to less than $19,000.
While no one tracks how many Canadians travel to the United States for medical care, the issue has prompted university studies in both countries. A
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Robert Hegele had doubts. Even in 1999, as the research attracted wide media attention and the British Medical Journal declared, “Thrifty gene identified in Manitoba Indians,” Dr. Hegele could not be certain – which is telling, since he was the geneticist who had made the discovery.
But back then he still thought further work would bear it out. Part of a small research group, Dr. Hegele had been studying the astonishing prevalence of type 2 diabetes among the Ojibwa-Cree people of Sandy Lake, an isolated reserve in Northern Ontario not far from the Manitoba boundary.
At that time, gene hunting in remote populations was as fashionable as starting a dot-com, and the Sandy Lake project stood out as a model – a rare instance in which a community negotiated compensation for the DNA of its members. In exch
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If Wilbur can’t get past the co-op board, will a dog or cat do?
If kids who live in close proximity to farm animals seem to develop asthma at lower-than-average rates, can urban or suburban children reap the same benefits by acquiring a dog or cat?
That was our first question after reading a recent WSJ story by Shirley Wang, which covered a study suggesting the greater variety of microbes farm kids are exposed to seem to be beneficial. T
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Susan, 45, was undoing her jacket so that I could measure her waist circumference. I was startled by how much her stomach seemed to spring out. She had concealed her girth well. Not using my best bedside manner, I blurted out, “What’s this?”
Her husband, who was looking on, was amused by my discovery. He answered, “That, doctor? That’s her Canadian tire.”
Though both Susan and her husband chuckled at this, I went into medical-counselling mode. It was no laughing matter. Over time, excess abdominal fat can kill.
In fact, doctors are recognizing that a person’s waist circumference (WC) is a powerful predictor of long-term health, and are adopting it as a new vital sign. “Waist
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For the third time this week, we’re reporting on a Johnson & Johnson recall. (See here and here for the other two.)
This time the recall seems to involve only a few hundred units. As Dow Jones Newswires reports, J&J is pulling at least 395 injection pens in the U.S. and Germany that are pre-loaded with Simponi, a rheumatoid-arthritis drug. The pens in question, which may not deliver a full dose of the medicine due to a manufacturing problem, were made at a plant in Switzerland, a J&J spokesman tells DJN. Not affected are prefilled syringes of the drug.
We’ve been keeping tabs on J&J’s string of recalls, which cost it about $900 million in sales last year. Here’
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Canada needs to correct a fundamental injustice by creating a no-fault compensation plan for those who are severely harmed by vaccines, a study concludes.
The report, published in the Munk School Briefings, argues that because vaccination is a cornerstone of public health and strongly encouraged (even mandatory in some circumstances), there is an ethical obligation to compensate people in the rare instances when they suffer disability or death as a result.
Further, Canada is the only Group of Eight country, other than Russia, that has not adopted this “principle of reciprocity,” by creating a national no-fault compensation plan, according to the authors.
The paper, written by Jennifer Keelan, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Kumanan Wilson of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute at the University of Ottawa, notes that there are a handful of cases of “vaccine-damaged” individuals each year, but there has never been a successful vaccine injury case.
“The tort system is not an efficient way of adjudicating these issues,” Dr. Wilson said i
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