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India launches its indigenous cervical cancer screening device

India launched its first indigenously developed device for screening and early detection of cervical cancer, which kills over 74,000 women in the country every year.

Launching the low-cost “AV-Magnivisualiser” device developed by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare Ghulam Nabi Azad said it will help in early detection of cervical cancer among adolescent girls and women, thus helping in save many lives.

Designed and developed at Institute of Cytology and Preventive Oncology ( ICPO), Noida, working under ICMR, the device will cost about Rs 10,000 and is much lower as compared to the cervical cytology method used at present in medical colleges, the equipment of which costs over Rs eight lakh.

“I am extremely happy and I congratulate the scientists involved in the cutting-edge level. I hope the cost-effective device will be available in the market in the next eight months to help ensure ..

The Minister said with this device it will be easy to screen and detect cervical cancer in its early stages, thus making treatment more effective.

“We will also ensure proper training of nurses and manpower for using the device in the coming months,” he said, adding that screening for cervical cancer is available only in regional cancer institutes and medical colleges at present.

He said the equipment presently being used is expensive, as a result of which not many medical coll ..

Source: Economic Times

Kenyan Scientists to Make Saliva Test Kits for Malaria

Cabinet Secretary of Health Mr. James Macharia (middle) cutting a cake to celebrate the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) certification for the ISO 9001:2008 (QMS) at KEMRI Headquarters in Ngumo on December 18, 2013. KEMRI scientists will conduct a research on testing of malaria using saliva. PHOTO | FILE

Scientists at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri) are developing a kit to test malaria from saliva and are hoping it may be available in a few years, allAfrica.com reported Friday.

“Use of saliva would be popular because the procedure is not invasive. Furthermore the diagnostic tool under development would be capable of quantifying parasite density,” commented lead researcher Eva Aluvaala.

Aluvaala noted that current blood tests “cannot quantify parasite density, which is important when trying to assess the severity of disease and whether or not a patient is responding to therapy.”

A study of the test began in February this year and is being sponsored by the Canadian government and ends August next year.

Source: First world med tech

 

Service dog stays with 7-year-old girl through surgery

 

When 7-year-old Kaelyn Krawczyk went in for surgery at Duke Medical Center on Wednesday, she had a special friend accompany her into the operation room – her service dog, JJ.

According to reports from Cary News, Kaelyn suffers from a rare condition called mastocytosis, which causes her body to have allergic reactions to heat, cold and other unknown triggers. During Wednesday’s surgery, doctors were trying to discover what was causing the recurring kidney infections Kaelyn had been experiencing.

However, the routine procedure presented special risks for Kaelyn because of her extreme susceptibility to allergic reactions.

JJ, a terrier mix, has been trained to detect Kaelyn’s allergic reactions before they become too severe – alerting her parents to treat Kaelyn with an EpiPen. In the 18 months that JJ has been with Kaelyn, she’s experienced only one severe reaction – compared to the three to four reactions a year she had experienced in the past.

Though JJ wouldn’t have been able to accompany Kaelyn into a sterile operating room, he’s allowed to be present in more relaxed medical settings – after receiving a bath, Cary News reported.

During the procedure, JJ stood up and turned in circles as Kaelyn was put under and brought out of sedation – signs of a mild, but not severe reaction. With the help of the dog’s trainer, Deb Cunningham of Eyes, Ears, Nose and Paws in Carrboro, NC, anesthesiologists were able to monitor Kaelyn’s reactions throughout the successful procedure.

“It sounds silly, in this age of technology, when we have millions of dollars-worth of equipment beeping around me, that we had a little dog who was more sensitive than all the machines,” Dr. Brad Taicher, Kaelyn’s anesthesiologist, told Cary News.

Source; Fox news

3-year-old Tampa boy survives rare 5-organ transplant

A little boy from Tampa has survived a five-organ transplant. Tuesday, his mother and doctors shared their medical miracle with the world.

Three-year-old Adonis Ortiz was born with his intestines outside his abdominal wall.

“Four hours after he was born, he had his first surgery,” said his father Eximer Ortiz.

Adonis had “short gut syndrome,” which meant he did not have enough intestine to absorb nutrients.

It means he has had to be fed intravenously all his life, and has never been able eat.

Then, his liver started to fail.

So in October, doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami did a rare, multi-transplant surgery. Adonis got a new liver, pancreas, stomach, and small and large intestines.

All the organs came from the same donor.

The surgery took six hours, and Adonis pulled through remarkably well.

Source: News whip

‘The girl with half a face’: Teen with rare facial deformity

Surviving adolescence can be difficult for anyone – but for Sarah Atwell, navigating her teenage years was an especially harsh struggle.

Since birth, Sarah has suffered from a rare disease called neurofibromatosis – a condition that triggered a massive tumor to develop on half of her face. Over time, Sarah’s deformity steadily grew worse, causing the right side of her face to dramatically droop downward.

The condition – which is mostly cosmetic – made Sarah the target of intense bullying for many years.

“It was really hard; I used to get bullied a lot,” Sarah, now 18, told FoxNews.com. “They used to call me ‘fat face’ and say I had diseases. As a little kid hearing it, it didn’t feel very good.”

But finally, after years of suffering through negative comments, Sarah made the decision to undergo risky reconstructive surgery in order to remove part of her tumor. Her journey is chronicled in a new one-hour special called “The Girl With Half a Face,” which premieres Wednesday 10 p.m., ET on “Discovery Fit & Health.”

Living with neurofibromatosis

A very rare genetic disorder, neurofibromatosis is characterized by a disturbance of cell growth in the nervous system, prompting tumors to develop on some of the body’s nerve tissues. These tumors can grow in almost any area of the body, but in Sarah’s case, the tumor was concentrated on the entire right side of her face.

“It’s an unusual congenital condition,” Dr. Steven Morris, Sarah’s surgeon, told FoxNews.com. “In [Sarah’s] particular presentation, it basically involves a large growth of nerve elements in the face. It’s usually benign, but it grows over a period of time and creates deformities. It may be a fairly small and isolated lesion, but in her case, it was one big mass.”

Because of her tumor’s size, Sarah said she felt incredibly self-conscious growing up and became reluctant to socialize with others. After enduring school days filled with name calling and hurtful comments, she would mostly come home and just stay in her room.

Fortunately, Sarah had one important outlet growing up: working with children. She enjoyed babysitting younger kids in her neighborhood or helping children through specialized programs at her high school.

According to Sarah, the children she worked with didn’t care about her tumor.

“If I was having a bad day, a smile or hug from them turned everything around,” Sarah said.

Yet the bad days often outweighed the good, and Sarah eventually became fed up with all of the bullying and teasing from her classmates. Finally, she decided enough was enough and that it was time to take a stand. One night, when her parents weren’t home, Sarah made a video in which she told her story on a series of note cards.

And when she posted it online, the response was incredible.

Life changing surgery

Not only did Sarah receive tons of support from online viewers, her viral video also led her to Dr. Steven Morris, in the division of plastic surgery at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

“When she first came to see me, the lesion really occupied the whole of her right face; it was growing all around her eye,” Morris said. “She’d had a couple of previous de-bulking procedures, but [the tumor] went from her nose to the ear on the right, and the skin hung down off of her jawbone. It was an enormous overgrowth of abnormal tissue.”

After assessing the true size of the tumor, Morris agreed to operate on Sarah – though he warned her that it could be a very dangerous procedure. Since they would be reconstructing her face, there was a risk that they could sever a blood vessel and she could suffer too much blood loss.

“The principle of our surgical approach is to maintain normal tissue so the skin is fairly normal,” Morris said. “The nerves are very abnormal, so [in typical cases] there might be a fine wisp of a nerve fiber, but when it grows in neurofibromatosis, it might be as big as a pencil. So we’re trying to maintain normal nerve function and trying to preserve normal structure.”

Despite the inherent risks, Sarah agreed to undergo the operation – and after four hours of intensive reconstructive surgery, the procedure was finished. Once her facial swelling went down, Sarah decided to look into the mirror for the first time.

“I was pretty happy, because I had straight lips,” Sarah said. “I kept looking in the mirror and taking pictures of myself. My mom and neighbors were shocked. We sent my dad pictures, and he was really happy. He said as long as I’m happy, he’s happy.”

While Sarah’s major operation is now complete, there is still more work to be done in order to give Sarah the face she wants.

“The next procedure will be to de-bulk the tumor around her eye,” Morris said. “Her eye had some sight in it, but it wasn’t a great amount of sight. The tough challenge is what to do with eye and reshape the eye socket.”

But no matter what happens, Sarah is confident that she will achieve her dreams in life. While the surgery helped to alter her appearance, she said it hasn’t altered what really matters.

“I don’t think it’s really changed anything,” Sarah said. “Like I said to my mum, I can do anything I put my heart to.”

Source: article

Doctors perform C-section on woman who wasn’t pregnant

Officials in southeastern Brazil say doctors performed a cesarean section on a 37-year-old woman only to discover that she wasn’t pregnant.

Simone Carvalho is a spokeswoman for the Health Department of the coastal city of Cabo Frio. She said Tuesday the woman told doctors at the city’s Woman’s Hospital she was 41 weeks pregnant and in pain.

Carvalho said one reason doctors believed she was pregnant was because “she had the symptoms associated with pregnancy like an enlarged abdomen and nausea.”

Carvalho said “doctors could not hear the baby’s heartbeat and feeling its life was in danger ordered an emergency cesarean after which they discovered it was a false pregnancy.”

The spokeswoman added the woman “was so convinced she was pregnant, that she altered her prenatal tests that showed otherwise because she was convinced the results were wrong.”

Source: fox news

 

Your Wireless Router Could Be Murdering Your Houseplants

Are you slowly killing your houseplants? Probably. But there might be a reason other than neglect that they’re all yellow and wilting: your Wi-Fi router.

An experiment by a handful of high school students in Denmark has sparked some serious international interest in the scientific community.

Five ninth-grade girls at Hjallerup School in North Jutland, Denmark, noticed they had trouble concentrating after sleeping with their mobile phones at their bedsides. They tried to figure out why. The school obviously doesn’t have the equipment to test human brain waves, so the girls decided to do a more rudimentary experiment.

They placed six trays of garden cress seeds next to Wi-Fi routers that emitted roughly the same microwave radiation as a mobile phone. Then they placed six more trays of seeds in a separate room without routers. The girls controlled both environments for room temperature, sunlight and water.

After 12 days, they found the garden cress seeds in the router-less room had exploded into bushy greenery, while the seeds next to the Wi-Fi routers were brown, shriveled and even mutated. See for yourself:

Teacher Kim Horsevad told the Daily Dot that her students did the test twice with the same results. She was quick to point out that while the students did the experiment to test only one variable to the best of their ability, it is a high school experiment and this isn’t a professional study.

“Some of the local debate has been whether the effects were due the cress seeds drying up because of heat from the computers or Access Points used in the experiment, which is a suggestion I can thoroughly refute,” Horsevad said. “The pupils were painstakingly careful in keeping the conditions for both groups similar. The cress seeds in both groups were kept sufficiently moist during the whole experiment, and the temperature were controlled thermostatically. The computers were placed so that the heat would not affect the seeds, which was verified by temperature measurements. Still, there may be confounders which neither the pupils or I have been aware of, but I cannot imagine what they would be.”

She said the results are clearly dramatic and could trigger additional research. Two scientists, neuroscience professor Olle Johanssen at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Dr. Andrew Goldsworthy at the Imperial College in London, have both expressed an interest in the experiment and may repeat it in a professional lab environment.

Perhaps coolest of all, the students were awarded for their work at the Danish national science fair.

Source: mashable

Woman in Madhya Pradesh delivers 10 babies

In an extremely rare case, a 28-year-old woman in Madhya Pradesh delivered 10 babies – but all

stillborn, a doctor said on Monday.

Anju Kushwaha from Koti village in Satna district was being taken to the Sanjay Gandhi Memorial
hospital, 125 km away in neighbouring Rewa district, after she went into labour but she delivered nine
stillborn babies on the way.

A doctor attending to the woman said the medical team was awestruck when Anju’s husband Sanjay presented
before them the nine stillborn babies.

When the medical team examined her, they found one more foetus was in the woman’s womb. It was delivered
early on Monday but again turned out to be stillborn, said the hospital’s assistant superintendent SK
Pathak.

The doctors said it was a case of miscarriage followed by “hyper stimulation syndrome”, where fertility
drugs stimulate the ovaries to produce many egg sacs.

The woman is keeping well, doctors said.

Source: NDTV

Oakland girl declared brain dead three days after having tonsils removed

The family of Jahi McMath wants answers after the 13-year-old girl suffered complications soon after having her tonsils out. ‘She wasn’t able to talk, and she started to write notes to her mother saying I’m swallowing too much mucus, mom — am I OK? Mom — I feel like I’m choking,’ her uncle says. The family is hoping for a Christmas miracle by keeping Jahi on life support.

She was just supposed to have her tonsils out, and now her heartbroken family wants answers.
Jahi McMath, 13, was declared brain dead on Thursday, three days after undergoing surgery at Children’s Hospital Oakland. Despite the tragic development, the family is holding out hope and refusing to take Jahi off life support.
“It’s shock, it’s disbelief,” uncle Omari Sealey told the San Jose Mercury News. “You never think something like this will happen to you.”

Jahi, an eighth grader at E.C. Reems Academy of Technology and Arts in Oakland, underwent the tonsils procedure on Dec. 9 in order to improve her sleep apnea. After the surgery she asked for a popsicle and seemed OK, but just 30 minutes later she started choking on her own blood, NBC reported.
“She wasn’t able to talk, and she started to write notes to her mother saying I’m swallowing too much mucus, mom — am I OK? Mom — I feel like I’m choking,” Sealey told the Mercury News. “And she began to write these notes because she couldn’t talk because there was so much blood — it wasn’t mucus — it was blood. But my sister, the mother, was too afraid to let her know that it was blood and not mucus.”
Jahi went into cardiac arrest and was revived, but was declared brain dead two days later, family members told the Mercury News. They are urging the hospital to investigate what they believe to be shoddy emergency care.

‘here catch them with the cup so we can measure them,'” mom Nailah Winkfield told ABC.
Grandmother Sandra Chatman, a surgical nurse at a different hospital, was stunned by the lack of attention that Jahi received.
“I went in and I said ‘is this normal, do you guys find this to be normal?,'” Chatman told ABC. “And they said ‘I don’t really know,’ and I said ‘well then get a doctor.'”

Sealey told NBC that family members believe “an error was committed by the hospital, either before, during, or after surgery. I absolutely believe that somewhere along the way, there was a protocol that wasn’t followed, or there was a surgical error.”
Hospital spokeswoman Melinda Krigel said in a statement: “We’re very sad about this outcome, about what’s happened to her, but at this point I have no information on the details of the surgery. We will certainly investigate what happened. In any surgery there are risks and there can be unexpected, unanticipated complications.”

The family is hoping for a Christmas miracle by keeping Jahi on life support, even though doctors say she is brain dead.
“My little girl in there, my little niece, is in there with her own heartbeat, which lets me know that she is alive,” Sealey told NBC.

source: Daily news

Road Crashes Found to be Americans Biggest Killers While Abroad

Americans traveling abroad are faced with larger health threats including road crashes, a new study finds.

Between 2003 and 2009, more Americans have died abroad from crashes that involved cars or motorcycles than from homicide and other terrorist events, the researchers involved in the study wrote in the journal Injury Prevention. “Money spent on public health interventions related to homicides has apparently been spent successfully,” said Dr. David Bishai, lead author of the study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“But there is a gap in funding now,” he added. “What gets travelers abroad isn’t so much infectious disease or homicide – it’s road safety. The U.S. Department of State spends approximately $51.6 billion annually to protect its citizens both abroad and at home, but health risks during international travel can be very tricky. Bishai and his team measured deaths per one million visits to a country by American travelers. During the six-year study period, the U.S. Department of State data showed a total of $5.417 unnatural deaths among Americans while traveling abroad.

The top-five countries for international deaths were Colombia, with 13.7 international deaths per million American visits, the Dominican Republic with 11 deaths per million; Thailand and Morocco, each with 5.5 international deaths per million visits and the Philippines, with a rate of 21 per million visits. With the exception of the Philippines, more Americans died from road crashes in all of the 160 countries surveyed than from homicide.

Thailand has the most number of traffic fatalities with 16.5 deaths per million visits, followed by Vietnam with 15 fatal road accidents per million visits. “People will go to Vietnam and ride on a motorcycle because it’s the way to get around,” Bishai said.

Source: parent herald