A study of a million UK women, published in the British Medical Journal, indicates that those who drink alcohol and are overweight may be at as much as double the risk for developing cirrhosis of the liver and other liver diseases. The study suggests that alcohol limits for obese and overweight people may need to be redefined.
Links to other sites: British Medical Journal, BBC
The president of Nigeria, Umaru Yar’Adua, has returned home after three months of medical treatment in Saudi Arabia, but the government has not issued a statement about his health. His arrival and the lack of information are “raising fresh questions over the leadership of Africa’s most populous nation,” reports Al Jazeera. Goodluck Jonathan, the vice-president has held effective power since January.
Links to other sites: AllAfrica, Al Jazeera, Guardian
Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates says that Africa will begin to reap the rewards of money invested in it, in his second annual public letter linked to the world of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “With better seeds, training, and access to markets, farmers in poor countries will be able to grow more food. The world will find clean ways to produce electricity at a lower cost, and more people will lift themselves out of poverty.” The upbeat appraisal notes that better education and health pilot programmes to reduce infant mortality in the first 30 days after birth have been shown to be effective. More widespread vaccination programmes are also playing a key role in improving overall health, says Gates. In a separate interview with CNET, where he talks about the problems encountered during the past year of the foundation’s work he says that adult male circumcision, surprisingly, turns out to be one of the hopes for reducing Aids in Africa.
Links to other sites: allAfrica, CNET, The Gates Notes, Bill Gates new web site, launched 24 January
Barry Callebaut supplies chocolate-makers: Salon du Chocolat, Paris, October 2009
Barry Callebaut's chocolate supply samples, Paris Salon du Chocolat, 2009
Zurich / Vevey, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The global economic crisis may have served up stress and more stress to many people, but the Swiss chocolate industry appears to be sailing happily through it: Barry Callebaut sales in 2008-2009 rose 4.1 percent in a world market that contracted by 2 percent last year. The Zurich-based company is the world’s largest supplier of top-quality cocoa and chocolate products. Profits also rose, 18.5 percent for net profits in local currencies, but the strong Swiss franc had a negative impact.The company reported 11 November on its fiscal year, which closed 31 August 2009.
Nestle at the same time has offered chocolate lovers good news from its research laboratory near Vevey: 40 grams of dark chocolate a day, one small square, has been shown in tests to reduce stress levels. The research is published in the Journal of Proteome Research.
Only by prescription in South Korea © 2009 F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd
Basel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swiss drug giant Roche confirmed Friday, 6 November, it was under investigation by the South Korean Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for illegally helping British bank HSBC and other companies in South Korea to acquire the drug tamiflu. The FDA raided the local offices of Roche 4 November and seized documents and computer files. It is illegal to purchase tamiflu in South Korea without a medical prescription.
Handicapped people are incapable of work, without totally committing themselves to their company © 2009 Office fédéral des assurances sociales (OFAS)
St. Gallen, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Former US President Bill Clinton gave the keynote speech at the inauguration of a new centre at St. Gallen’s university to study the integration into the workforce of people with disabilities , 5 November.
The Centre for Disability and Integration (CDI-HSG) opened in March 2009, made possible through the help of MyHandicap.com, an organization founded by Joachim Schoss and supported by Clinton.
Viral Flu, © 2009 Novartis AG
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – US President Barack Obama declared swine flu a national emergency late Friday 23 October, in order to relax some Medicaid and Medicare (national health insurance for the elderly and the poor) rules ahead of a potential surge in cases that could swamp the country’s medical facilities. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says the epidemic has increased in the past weeks and is now widespread in 46 of the 50 states. Swine flu activity has reached levels that the seasonal flu variety normally reaches in late November to March, CDC reported 23 October.
People at particular risk are pregnant women, especially those in the latest stage of pregnancy, children under the age of two, and people with pre-existing pulmonary problems, like asthma. In these cases, patients can develop severe symptoms within 3-5 days. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that the disease can progress rapidly, leading to respiratory collapse and the urgent need for mechanical respiration.
Ribosome at work
The accurate atom-by-atom description of ribosomes, the protein factories at the heart of the cell, earned three scientists the Nobel Prize for Chemistry 7 October. The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences honoured Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath for their groundbreaking work over 20 years starting in the 1970s on the structure and workings of ribosomes. Using a technique called X-ray crystallography, they mapped each of the hundreds of thousands of atoms of the ribosome.
The knowledge the scientists gained allows modern pharmceutical companies to produce a new generation of antibiotics to replace the many drugs on the market, to which bacteria have become resistant. The new drugs target the ability of bacteria ribosomes to produce proteins, and thus to live.
Each cell contains the DNA code for the entire organism, but it is the ribosome that decodes the DNA, and creates the proteins that actually do the work inside an organism. They produce haemoglobin, antibodies, insulin, enzymes and hundreds of other proteins in the body. Without ribosomes, DNA would be so many dead letters. BBC, Reuters
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Sales of micro-insurance policies to the world’s poor has increased 50 percent since 2008, according to Zurich Financial’s micro-insurance unit. Small policies that cover health events, household contents, life insurance, and fire and flood protection for low-income people are increasing because of innovative ways of distributing insurance products, which the company says are themselves innovative.
Distribution channels include pharmacies in Bolivia that sell scratch cards for personal accident insurance, and post offices in India that offer life insurance. Low-income households in Indonesia can buy flood coverage for about $10 per year through cooperatives.
US President Barack Obama says that he “wants to get something done this year” about health care reform, and will address Congress in a major speech 9 September to clarifiy his ideas about the best way to move forward. He promises to “make sure that Democrats and Republicans understand that I’m open to new ideas, that we’re not being rigid and ideological about this thing, but we do intend to get something done this year”, he said in an ABC news interview 8 September.
Health care reform has been bogged down in both houses of Congress, where Obama’s Democrats have solid majorities, by recalcitrance on a “public option”, a public health insurance system alongside the private system.
Newt Gingrich, former Republican speaker of the House in the 1990s says in an interview 8 September with NPR, that his advice to Obama is to break health care reform up into five or seven manageable bills, each addressing a separate issue. “I think if they would take — and this is what I suggested to Mrs. Clinton (in 1993, when Hilary Clinton tried to introduce health care reform, ed. note)— if they would take five to seven smaller bills, take one on litigation reform to lower the cost of defensive medicine and to save billions of dollars; take one on fixing Medicare and Medicaid so we are not paying billions to crooks who are not delivering services; have one on prevention and wellness; have one on better practices. You could pass five to seven bills and, collectively, they would add up to an enormous amount of change.” BBC, NPR, Reuters
ProDisc-L (photo ©2009 Synthes)
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Zurich-based Synthes, a medical device company best known as a manufacturer of plates, screws and bolts used in treating trauma injuries such as broken bones, has won a key decision in a district court lawsuit in the US against US-based Medtronic, which has a regional head office in Tolochenaz, Vaud.
Geneva, Switzerland: third World Climate Change Conference 2009
Complete coverage of the WCC-3 by GenevaLunch
Conference is 31 August – 4 September 2009
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Small is increasingly seen as beautiful by climate experts, who say that making more information available about climate change at a local level is a key to helping the world adapt.
Leading specialists in the field, meeting at the World Climate Conference (WCC-3) which opened Monday 31 August in Geneva, are also putting the accent on developing countries, saying that while we all need more local information about climate change, these countries are in critical need of micro-solutions. These will be developed, however, only when appropriate, accurate, user-friendly weather information is available to them. Many developing countries lack even the most basic weather information, disseminated on a large scale.
West Nile Virus Mosquito found in Switzerland - Photo UZH News
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - A mosquito capable of transmitting the West Nile Virus and Japanese encephalitis has been found in central Switzerland by researchers at the Parasitology Institute of the University of Zurich.
An expert parasitologist, Professor Alexander Mathis, says it can be safely assumed that the presence of the Aedes japonicus, also known as the Asian rock pool mosquito, is spreading and may be permanent.
Title: Tai-Chi by the Lake
Location: Geneva
Link out: Click here
Description: This is an almost-free Tai-Chi session that takes place every Sunday of the year. From June to September the class is from 09:15 to 10:15 and from May to October from 10:00-11:00. During the summer months you pay the CHF2 fee to get in the Bains des Paquis. The rest of the year entry is free. A donation of CHF20 for the year is encouraged.
Start Date: 03 Aug 2009
End Date: 27 Dec 2009
New Media campaign against A/H1N1
[public health video] Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The fight against the A/H1N1 virus in the French-speaking part of Switzerland is taking on a new face, a drag face.
The Federal Office of Public Health has started its swine flu awareness media campaign, “United against the flu” with a bit of humour: a comedian dressed in drag.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has left the Paris hospital where he spent the night. Sarkozy was under observation after reports of feeling faint while jogging. However, the Elysée Palace denied the claims, saying that Sarkozy suffered a ”minor” nerve complaint in the park of the Palace of Versailles. BBC, Le Monde
Riots in South African townships have been spreading, and police 22 July arrested some 100 people, after protests broke out over the lack of basic services in the poverty-riddled sprawling urban areas. A government report published 23 July that shows a 20 percent increase in maternal deaths, many of them preventable, is likely to trigger more anger over inadequate services. The health report indicates that 43 percent of the maternal deaths were due to HIV/Aids. Only 60 percent of the women who died had been tested for this, but 80 percent of those women tested positive. ABC Australia, AllAfrica
England (GenevaLunch) – Boudicca Downes, the daughter of Joan and Sir Edward Downes, the composer, talks to Britain’s Guardian newspaper about her parents’ decision to end their lives together at the Dignitas clinic in Zurich, Switzerland. The couple died 13 July after taking a lethal dose of barbituates in the closely monitored Swiss clinic.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The World Health Organization in Geneva has decided to stop issuing its global tallies of A/H1N1 flu cases, noting that “at this point, further spread of the pandemic, within affected countries and to new countries, is considered inevitable.” Newly affected countries are still required to confirm all new cases and “as far as feasible, provide weekly aggregated case numbers and descriptive epidemiology of the early cases.
Reporting requirements are being relaxed for countries with “community-wide” transmission of the virus but all countries are being asked to remain vigilant in monitoring the virological characteristics of the pandemic virus.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The swine flu (A/H1N1) is now unstoppable, and although so far the “severity is moderate” countries must now take measures to vaccinate their populations, the World Health Organization (WHO) noted after a high-level meeting Monday 13 July in Geneva. Its group of experts says there is not enough vaccine to cover all needs. To ensure an equitable distribution among countries it issued guidelines calling for health workers to be covered and populations at risk to be vaccinated before other groups.
Basel and Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Tests completed on 152 tattooing products “show clearly that manufacturers and users are not adequately respecting safety standards,” Bern said in a press release Monday 13 July. Forty percent of the samples are being banned from use as a result of the findings.
Government laboratories have completed tests on products used in tattooing in 16 cantons and Liechtenstein: only 21 percent, or 32 of them, passed safety standards established in January 2008. The standards cover microbiological purity, chemical composition as well as the quality of the tattoos’ colours from a safety perspective. Most of the shortcomings are linked to the chemical composition and labeling of products. The tests check conservation agents, colouring agents as well as scents. They also review sterilization quality and check labels, which should list the products’ compositions, use-by dates and the lot numbers.
Drug maker Novartis said it had no plans to donate the A/H1N1 vaccine the company is developing to poorer nations, chief executive Daniel Vasella told the Financial Times. WHO (World Health Organization) director general Margaret Chan has urged drugs makers to show solidarity with poorer nations that may not be able to afford to purchase the vaccine. Other pharmaceutical companies, such as GlaxoSmith Kline have announced their willingness to donate a portion of their production, the FT reports.
The United Kingdom announced over the weekend its first death to swine flu, making this the first fatality outside of the Americas since the virus was first detected in late March.
A new report from Cancer Research UK shows that men are 70 percent more likely to develop types of cancer that affect both men and women and 60 percent more likely to die from them. The reasons are not clear but appear to be linked to a greater reluctance on the part of men to visit the doctor and obtain treatment early enough. “It is thought half of all cancers can be prevented through lifestyle changes,” notes the BBC, covering the report’s publication.
The State of California is facing bankruptcy and governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is threatening to close down the goverment for lack of funds, but they pay themselves very healthy salaries and they own the building and rent it back to the centre: they are the executives at the Tarzana Treatment Centre near Los Angeles, California, a non-profit centre that treats drug addiction with tax-payers’ dollars. Through skillful management of the system, this is all legal. Los Angeles county contracts out drug treatment for offenders to non-profit organizations, such as the Tarzana centre. The centre recieves 85 percent of its funds from public sources. LA Times
As the World Health Organization (WHO) announces phase six of the pandemic A/H1N1 swine flu 11 June, a curious fact jumps out from the map that the organization publishes each day with its statistics. Not one sub-Saharan African country has reported a single case of the new flu. The only African country with officially reported cases is Egypt, with 10 (11 June).
On the face of it, the populations in many of Africa’s countries would be prime candidates for contracting flu. They are poor, often malnourished, suffering from war and disease in many places, and crowded into teeming cities with poor provision of basic services. How have they avoided A/H1N1?
