Medical Devices Vulnerable to Hacking Need Oversight

Wireless medical devices are potentially vulnerable to being remotely controlled by hackers and should be tracked more closely, according to a Government Accountability Office report.

The investigation into electronic medical-device safety was initiated after computer-security researchers found dangerous vulnerabilities in insulin pumps. Diabetics rely on the pumps, which are worn next to the skin, to dispense insulin, a life- saving hormone.

Even the human body is vulnerable to attack from computer hackers,” Representative Anna Eshoo, a Democrat from California, said in a statement on her website. “Implantable medical devices have resulted in tremendous medical benefits for the patients who use them, but the demonstrated security risks require a renewed emphasis by the FDA and manufacturers to identify, evaluate and plug the potentially rare but serious security holes that exist in these devices.”

Eshoo, along with Democratic Representatives Edward Markey and Donna Edwards, had asked last year for the GAO report, which called on the Food and Drug Administration to oversee better identification and investigation of security problems in electronic medical equipment such as insulin pumps, pacemakers and defibrillators.

Remote Control

Computer-security researcher Jay Radcliffe, a diabetic who found dangerous vulnerabilities in his own insulin pump, and another Barnaby Jack, who worked separately as a professional hacker for McAfee, both demonstrated ways to manipulate the wireless capabilities on devices made by Minneapolis-based Medtronic Inc. (MDT) to remotely take over the pumps and dispense fatal doses of insulin.

Congress members called for the GAO investigation following a report by the Associated Press on Radcliffe’s research, which he presented at a security conference in Las Vegas. More vulnerability were later uncovered by Jack, Bloomberg.com reported on its Tech Blog.

Earlier research bolstered their claims. A 2008 study from a consortium of academics found that a popular pacemaker- defibrillator could be reprogrammed to deliver deadly shocks.

A key issue is that the FDA has not evaluated risks from hacking attacks as part of its screening of new devices until recently, the GAO report said.

“The FDA’s focus has always been on the safety of medical devices, rather than the security of these devices,” Jack wrote in an e-mail. “They simply don’t have the expertise on staff to conduct a worthwhile security audit for every device that requires their approval.”

Security Risks

The FDA said breaches involving medical devices are not currently a widespread issue. The agency has taken steps to improve screening for security risks and agrees with the GAO that more efforts are necessary, it said in a statement today.

“FDA shares the concern over the security and privacy of medical devices, and emphasizes security as a key element in device design,” the agency said. “Any system with wireless communication can be subject to interception of data and compromised privacy as well as interference with performance that can compromise the safety and effectiveness of the device.”

Although medical-device manufacturers are becoming more aware of security risks affecting their products, they have been reluctant to spend the time and money fixing issues that in some cases have a low likelihood of happening outside of research labs, according to Radcliffe.

“I can very much sympathize with the manufacturers’ concerns,” Radcliffe said in an interview today. “When you’re dealing with this much vagueness, and you’re dealing with a security vulnerability where the risk is really, really low, you go to the FDA and say you want to change this device and it could be $500,000 and four years of time. In some cases, smaller manufacturers could go out of business.”

The recommendations, he said, should help create a shorter process “that all manufacturers can count on.”

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-27/medical-devices-vulnerable-to-hacks-need-oversight-report-says.html

Low Arsenic Levels Linked with Heart Disease

Exposure to even low levels of arsenic in drinking water and food may increase the risk of developing, and dying from, heart disease, a new study suggests.

In the study, researchers analyzed urine samples from 3,575 American Indians in Arizona, Oklahoma and North and South Dakota, living in regions where arsenic levels in drinking water were “low to moderate,” meaning they were above the limit set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is 10 micrograms per liter, but below 100 micrograms per liter.

Urine samples were collected between 1989 and 1991, and the participants were divided into four groups based on the concentration of inorganic arsenic in their urine. (There are two types of arsenic, organic and inorganic, inorganic arsenic is thought to be more toxic)

Source: http://www.livescience.com/39886-arsenic-heart-disease.html

US Attorneys General urge FDA to regulate e-cigarettes

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Top U.S. law enforcement officials urged the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday to promptly issue a promised set of rules governing the sale of e-cigarettes, adding to a growing body of legal and public health officials demanding action.

In 2009, the FDA was given authority to regulate cigarettes, cigarette tobacco and roll-your-own tobacco, although not pipe tobacco, cigars or e-cigarettes. The law allows the FDA to expand its authority over all tobacco products, but it must first issue new regulations. The FDA has said they are in development.

In a letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, Attorneys General from 41 states asked the agency to “take all available measures” to issue the rules by the end of October.

“We ask the FDA to move quickly to ensure that all tobacco products are tested and regulated to ensure that companies do not continue to sell or advertise to our nation’s youth,” they wrote.

The FDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The letter comes less than a week after the American Academy of Pediatrics and 14 other public health organizations, including the American Lung Association and American Heart Association, sent a letter to President Barack Obama asking him to pressure the FDA into issuing the rules.

In July, the FDA said it might place restrictions on menthol cigarettes following a review that showed the products are likely to be more addictive than regular cigarettes. The agency is seeking public comment.

In their letter, the Attorneys General noted that sales of e-cigarettes have doubled every year since 2008 and are projected to reach $1.7 billion in 2013. The cost, meanwhile, has fallen, making them more affordable and attractive to youth, they said.

Moreover, there are no restrictions on advertising e-cigarettes.

“Consumers are led to believe that e-cigarettes are a safe alternative to cigarettes, despite the fact that they are addictive, and there is no regulatory oversight ensuring the safety of the ingredients in e-cigarettes.”

Source: Foxnews.com

Britain to give $1.5 bn aid for AIDS, TB, Malaria

Britain will contribute one billion pounds ($1.5 billion) to the Global Fund to fight Aids, tuberculosis and Malaria over the next three years, said Justine Greening, international development secretary at the UN.

The investment, she said, showed Britain was leading the way in international aid and claimed the contribution would save a life every three minutes, Daily Express reported Tuesday.

The aid will fund lifesaving anti-retroviral therapy for 750,000 people living with HIV, 32 million more insecticide-treated nets to prevent the transmission of malaria and TB treatment for over a million people.

The Global Fund was created in 2002 as a public private partnership to raise funds to significantly change the course of HIV/AIDS, TB, and Malaria. Britain is the third largest donor, after the US and France.

Speaking at the UN General Assembly meeting, Greening said: “AIDS, TB and Malaria are among the world’s biggest killers despite being entirely preventable and treatable.

“The Global Fund has already helped save millions of lives but we must keep up the momentum if we are to beat these diseases for good.

“It is in all our interests to help people live longer, healthier, more productive lives so we all need to play our part in working towards a world free of HIV/Aids, Malaria and TB.”

Source: http://news.in.msn.com/international/article.aspx?cp-documentid=253733131

Deworming dose for over 3 million Delhi children

Delhi Health Minister A.K. Walia Tuesday launched the second round of annual de-worming in schools, expected to cover 3.6 million children in the national capital.

The first round of mass deworming was carried out in February 2012 and covered 2.7 million school children.

“The second round of deworming will cover children in anganwadi, government, municipal and cantonment schools. Deworming tablets or syrups will be given to pre-school children. There will also be a mop-up day for those who miss the first day,” said a statement.

The deworming program of the Delhi government was launched last year and is aimed at providing free and comprehensive health services to all school age children in the capital.

Non-governmental organization Deworm the World Initiative that has launched similar programs in 37 countries around the world, is giving technical support and donating drugs to the program.

Soil-transmitted worms are the commonest infestations in pre-school and school age children from poor communities. These infestations lead to anaemia, malnutrition, retarded physical and mental development, etc.

Regular deworming is the most effective way of immediately reducing worm burden and relieving children of the diseases.

Source: Business standard.com

Soon, spring-like fibres to mend broken hearts

Researchers have fabricated spring-like fibers to help repair damaged heart tissue.

Doctoral students Sharon Fleischer and Ron Feiner – under the supervision of Dr. Tal Dvir of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology and the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology – have fabricated fibers shaped like springs that allow engineered cardiac tissue to pump more like the real thing.

Dvir said that until now, when scientists have tried to engineer cardiac tissue, they’ve used straight fibers to support the contracting cells.

He said that but these fibers prevent the contraction of the engineered tissue and what they did was mimic the spring-like fibers that promote contraction and relaxation of the heart muscle.

Dvir asserted that they found that by growing tissues on these fibers, they got more functional tissues.

The researchers identified spiral-shaped collagen fibers in the extracellular matrix of rat hearts and seeing the potential for an advance, they set out to recreate them for the first time.

After fabricating the spring-like fibers using advanced techniques, they subjected them to a variety of tests.

As the researchers predicted, the spring-like fibers showed better mechanical properties than straight fibers, with especially improved elasticity.

And compared to tissue engineered with straight fibers, the tissue engineered with spring -like fibers contracted with greater force and less mechanical resistance.

They study has been published in the journal Bio-materials in August.

Source: deccanchronicle.com

Walnuts may prevent diabetes and heart disease

Eating walnuts daily can ward off diabetes and heart disease in at-risk individuals, a new study has found.

Researchers from the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center in Connecticut found daily intake of 56 g of walnuts improves endothelial function in overweight adults with visceral adiposity.

The study included a sample of 46 adults aged 30-75. Participants had a Body Mass Index larger than 25, and a waist circumference exceeding 40 inches for men and 35 inches for women.

They were also required to be non-smokers, and all exhibited one or more additional risk factors for metabolic syndrome, a precursor of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The group was randomly assigned to two 8-week sequences of either a walnut-enriched ad libitum diet or an ad libitum diet without walnuts. Those chosen for the walnut diet were instructed to consume 56 g of shelled, unroasted English walnuts per day as a snack or with a meal.

“We know that improving diets tends to be hard, but adding a single food is easy,” explained Dr David Katz, Director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center and lead author of the research team.

“Our theory is that if a highly nutritious, satiating food like walnuts is added to the diet, there are dual benefits: the benefits of that nutrient rich addition and removal of the less nutritious foods,” Katz said. The research found that daily intake of 56 g of walnuts improves endothelial function in overweight adults with visceral adiposity.

“The primary outcome measure was the change in flow-mediated vasodilatation (FMD) of the brachial artery,” researchers said. “Secondary measures included serum lipid panel, fasting glucose and insulin, Homeostasis Model Assessment-Insulin Resistance values, blood pressure, and anthropometric measures.

“FMD improved significantly from baseline when subjects consumed a walnut-enriched diet as compared with the control diet. Beneficial trends in systolic blood pressure reduction were seen, and maintenance of the baseline anthropometric values was also observed. Other measures were unaltered,” they said. The study is published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.

Source: Indian Express.com

Memory develops even beyond age 7: Study

Scientists have found that some important components of memory keep developing even after the age of 7.

While some parts of memory are nearly fully developed by 4 years of age, researchers found that episodic memory – the ability to remember not only what happened, but where and when – takes longer to develop than often assumed.

That means young children may have no problem with remembering certain simple events or facts. But in some cases, they may have difficulty placing them in the right place, time or context.

“It is often assumed that most development in memory occurs by the time children have completed preschool, but we found a lot happens in memory development after 7 years of age,” said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

Sloutsky conducted the study with Hyungwook Yim, a doctoral student in psychology at Ohio State, and Simon Dennis of the University of Newcastle in Australia.

Dennis said children experience major difficulty remembering events that have overlapping elements.

The study included two experiments with 4- and 7-year-old children and adults.

In one experiment, participants were shown pictures of six pairs of objects that had to be remembered together when they were in a red house, such as a couch and a bicycle, and a dog and coffee cup.

Some of the participants were then shown that in a blue house, the same objects appeared with different pairings.

The researchers made sure that each child remembered the pairs that were found in each house, so that these simple memories were not an issue.

What the researchers really wanted to know was whether children could correctly keep track of the overlapping elements of the memories, such as that the dog was paired with the coffee cup in the red house, but the dog was paired with the couch in the blue house.

The results showed that children had great difficulty remembering the different pairings in the red house versus the blue house.

“Children had a problem when there was overlap in what they had to remember from one context to another. They didn’t have the ability to create the more complex memory structures they needed,” Yim said.

In the second study, the researchers had the pairs of objects associated with cartoon characters that the children would be familiar with, such as Elmo and Dora the Explorer.

This was to see if making the context more interesting and relevant to the children (compared to the houses in the first experiment) would improve their memory.

However, the results showed the children’s performance did not significantly improve with the cartoon characters, rather than the houses.

The study will be published in the journal Psychological Science.

Source: Times of India

Weight loss tied to knee arthritis benefits

Intensive weight loss together with regular exercise did more to ease knee arthritis than exercise alone for overweight and obese adults in a new U.S. study.

Knee inflammation, pain and functioning all improved more among people who cut back on calories in addition to working out, researchers found.

The greatest benefits were seen among those who lost the most weight, and they tended to be the ones who combined diet and exercise.

“While both the exercise and the diet interventions separately were beneficial, the combination of the two was superior in virtually every outcome,” Stephen Messier, who led the study at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said.

Extra weight is known to raise the risk of knee osteoarthritis, which happens when cartilage around the joint breaks down, causing inflammation, pain and stiffness.

One review found that being overweight doubles a person’s risk of knee osteoarthritis, and being obese quadruples it

For the new study, Messier and his colleagues wanted to see what effect losing weight through a strict diet program would have on arthritis symptoms.

They randomly assigned 454 overweight and obese adults with mild or moderate knee arthritis to 18 months of diet counseling, exercise or both.

For participants on the diet, the goal was to lose at least 10 percent of their starting weight. People replaced some meals with shakes and attended regular weight monitoring and nutrition sessions.

The exercise program involved one hour of physical activity three times per week, including aerobic walking and strength training.

By the end of the study, people assigned to both diet and exercise had lost an average of 23 pounds. That compared to almost 20 pounds in the diet-only group and four pounds among those who only exercised.

Compared to people in the exercise-only group, those who combined diet and exercise had less knee inflammation and pain and better functioning at 18 months.

For example, pain scores measured on a scale of 0 to 20, with higher scores indicating more pain, fell by 3.1 points in the diet plus exercise group and by 1.4 points in the exercise-alone group and about the same in the diet-alone group.

Likewise, on a 0-to-68 scale measuring knee function, people in the combined diet and exercise group improved by an average of 10.5 points, versus 4.7 points among those who only exercised.

People in the diet-alone and the diet plus exercise groups had about the same levels of knee inflammation – both lower than in the exercise-alone group.

“No one expects diet and exercise to have a huge impact” on osteoarthritis, Dr. Amanda Nelson, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Thurston Arthritis Research Center, said.

“The fact that most of the improvements were modest is what we would expect to see.”

Regardless of their group, participants who lost 10 percent of their body weight or more saw greater improvements in inflammation and other arthritis measures than those who dropped less weight, the researchers write in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Messier told Reuters Health that exercise seems to have benefits for osteoarthritis independent of weight loss, so it should remain part of standard care.

Although not all patients may be able to find the same support provided in the study, many communities have YMCAs and other places people can go to get help with weight-loss and exercise goals, he noted.

Some people, Messier said, “just need help. If you have someone who is sedentary for most of their life … to just ask them, ‘Well, I think you need to lose a few pounds and exercise’ and then walk out the door, it’s not enough.”

Nelson, who wasn’t involved in the new research, told Reuters Health that people should also turn to family members and community groups for support, if possible.

Although a 10-percent weight loss continues to be the goal for overweight people with arthritis, even two pounds is better than nothing, she said.

“Patients should be encouraged that any weight loss is likely to be beneficial, and the more they can do the better,” Nelson said

Source: Reuters.com

 

High calorie diets shorten hospital stays for anorexic teens

Higher calorie diets produce twice the rate of weight gain compared to the lower calorie diets currently recommended to adolescents hospitalized with anorexia nervosa, according to a study.

Andrea Garber, PhD, RD, associate professor of pediatrics in the Division of Adolescent Medicine at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital said that these findings are crucial to develop evidence-based guidelines for the treatment of young people suffering from malnutrition related to anorexia nervosa.

In the study, researchers evaluated 56 adolescent patients who were placed on higher-calorie diets starting at 1800 calories per day and advanced by about 120 calories per day, versus those starting on 1100 calories a day and advanced at a slower rate of 100 calories per day.

Study participants were adolescents with anorexia nervosa who required hospitalization for malnutrition indicated by low body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate and body mass index. The primarily white female adolescent patients were fed three meals and three snacks each day and their vital signs were monitored closely, with their heart rates measured continuously and electrolytes checked twice a day.

When comparing the two groups, the rate of weight gain was almost double on higher- versus lower-calorie diets, and patients receiving more calories were hospitalized for an average of seven fewer days, without an increased risk of refeeding syndrome.

The study findings have been published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Source: Zee News