Smoking ‘a turn-off for dating’
February 15, 2012
To boost your chances of dating success this Valentine's Day quit the fags, suggests a poll that shows smoking is one of the biggest turn-offs.
Three-quarters of people aged 18 to 24 said they would not kiss someone who had just smoked.
And half the 1,700 people surveyed for the Department of Health (DoH) said they would think twice about starting a serious relationship with a smoker.
More than eight million people in England smoke.
Half of these are likely to die from smoking-related diseases if they do not quit.
By quitting smoking, smokers could increase their life expectancy by 16 years, estimates suggest.
So, people who want to stay one step ahead of the game this Valentine's Day should put an end to their habit and quit today, says the Department of Health.
Anecdotal reports from dating agencies appear to back this up, it says.
The relationship website eHarmony.co.uk says 81% of its members state they would not partner with a heavy smoker.
At Match.com 72% of male members and 73% of female members said they wanted a non-smoking partner and at mysinglefriend.com over 67% of respondents said smoking would put them off dating someone.
Sarah Beeny, host of Channel 4's Property Ladder and founder of mysinglefriend.com, said: "Whilst obviously people aren't permanently a smoker in many cases and some people can see past this – it does clearly influence a person's decision to date you.
"It's particularly obvious that non-smokers find it harder to live with a smoker, so by giving up you not only increase your dating market, but protect the years you have together when you do settle down."
But Simon Clark, director of the smokers' group Forest, said the DoH research was a waste of taxpayers' money, adding: "To then use it to denigrate a substantial minority of the population with cheap personal jibes says more about the Department of Health than it does about smokers and their attractiveness to other people."
© 2011 BBC News (www.bbc.co.uk)
Health Care In Massachusetts: ‘Abject Failure’ Or Work In Progress?
February 15, 2012
Story By: by Richard Knox
Voters are hearing a lot about health care this year. Republicans want to make the 2012 elections a referendum on the health care law that President Obama signed two years ago.
That law was largely based on one that then-Gov. Mitt Romney signed into law nearly six years ago in Massachusetts.
Romney is now a GOP presidential contender, and that has made the Massachusetts universal health care law a political football. Romney’s rival Rick Santorum recently called it “an abject failure.”
But “Romneycare,” as Santorum and others call it, isn’t controversial in its home state. And a lot of people there don’t call it Romneycare because it took the support of a lot of other people â Democratic legislators, business leaders, insurers, hospitals and doctors, consumer groups â to get it passed.
But it’s true that Romney got the ball rolling. When I interviewed him in 2006, Romney said he got the idea from talking to Massachusetts business leaders.
“The key insight was this: People who don’t have insurance nonetheless receive health care â and it’s expensive,” Romney said.
Romney saw a state fund set up to provide free care â paid for by a growing surcharge on private insurance premiums â was spending a billion dollars a year.
“My question was, could we take that billion dollars and help the poor purchase health insurance â let them pay what they could afford? We’d subsidize what they can’t,” Romney said.
The percentage of uninsured people has gone down. Nearly everybody in Massachusetts has health coverage, while the rate of uninsured nationally has gone up to one in six.
Source: Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation
The proportion of employers offering health plans has gone up in Massachusetts, despite fears that availability of government-subsidized insurance would “crowd out” employer-sponsored coverage. Nationally the rate is believed to be static.
Source: Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation
Access to health care has improved in Massachusetts, while emergency room visits have gone down â possibly a sign that people with insurance are more likely to have a regular source of care. Self-rated health is improving.
Source: Health Affairs
And he proposed a requirement that people buy private health insurance if they’re able. That’s the “individual mandate” that has become a curse word in Republican politics these days.
“We’re going to say, ‘Folks, if you can afford health care, then, gosh, you’d better go get it,’ ” Romney said back in 2006. ” ‘Otherwise you’re just passing on your expenses to someone else.’ That’s not Republican, that’s not Democratic, that’s not Libertarian â that’s just wrong.”
Flash forward to 2012. Romney’s successor, Democrat Deval Patrick, says the health plan Romney launched is no abject failure â it’s working.
“I think it’s just been a terrific success,” Patrick said in an interview. “And [it's] a statement of value â about our values here, about how people aren’t all on their own, that we are in this together.”
Patrick says no state can match Massachusetts’ record of getting more than 98 percent of its citizens insured for health care â and virtually every last child. And, he boasts, “It has cost the state about 1 percent in additional new state spending.”
The Massachusetts law has had strong and steady support â and little opposition. Last year, an attempt to repeal the “individual mandate” â the part that requires most people to have insurance â couldn’t get enough signatures. Last week, only 39 people had “liked” its Facebook page.
To get an idea of how it’s working at the ground level, I stopped by the office of Dieufort Fleurissaint, a self-employed Haitian-American businessman. He has a tax prep and insurance business. He’s also an evangelical minister who worked with the group Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, which helped get the health law passed.
“Close to 500,000 people didn’t have health insurance,” Fleurissaint says. “Now, because of the passing of the law, they have health insurance.”
And one of them, it turns out, is Fleurissaint. He used to be a mortgage broker, but his business crashed in 2008. He couldn’t pay his health insurance premiums.
But under the new law, Fleurissaint qualified for state-subsidized insurance.
“My premium … dropped from $1,200 on a monthly basis [to] $770 for the same coverage for the same family of four,” he says. And when his income dropped again during the recession, so did his health insurance costs.
“The law has been extremely good for me,” he says, but he admits that not all his business colleagues like the law.
“They complained that they were forced, basically obligated to purchase health insurance,” Fluerissaint says. “So I explained to them that it’s much better to have health insurance than not having it.”
In fact, despite some initial grumbling, more Massachusetts businesses of all sizes have begun offering insurance.
When I called the Massachusetts Restaurant Association, it said it didn’t know of any members that don’t offer coverage. That was surprising, since restaurant owners have been among the most opposed to health laws like this one.
Similarly, Bill Vernon, who heads the Massachusetts office of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, says the law “works for Massachusetts.” The NFIB is a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the Obama health plan that will be argued later this month before the U.S. Supreme Court.
But in Massachusetts, Vernon says, “my guess is that we would probably be pretty much split on the issue of whether to repeal the law or not. That suggests repeal is not something we would favor. And I don’t think it’s politically realistic, either.”
Likewise, the individual mandate has not met with nearly the resistance that many predicted.
“The sky did not fall,” says Andrew Dreyfus, president of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, the state’s largest insurer. “And by the way, we have much stronger penalties around the individual mandate than the national law has, and despite that, the sky did not fall.”
The penalty for not buying insurance can be on the order of $1,200 a year for a 37-year-old single person in Boston. But only about 1 percent of taxpayers end up paying any penalty.
Meanwhile, a new study in the journal Health Affairs shows that more Massachusetts citizens are seeing a doctor regularly, fewer are going to emergency rooms for care, and the percentage who rate their own health as “good” or “excellent” is going up.
But that doesn’t mean everything about Massachusetts health care is wonderful.
The 2006 law didn’t do anything about controlling the state’s health costs, which were already among the nation’s highest.
So now the conversation in Massachusetts has turned to cost control. And some very interesting things are beginning to happen.
They didn’t happen overnight. When Patrick took over the governor’s office in 2007, he called together top insurers, hospital executives and doctors to talk about controlling costs. He says it was an exercise in frustration.
“I finally lost my patience,” Patrick says. “Because they’d sit around the table and everyone would start their response the same way â ‘Well, governor,’ they’d say, ‘it’s complicated.’ “
Patrick says the insurers would point to the hospitals, the hospitals would point to the doctors, the doctors would say it’s malpractice suits or red tape or the imaging center down the street.
Patrick says he got fed up. “I understand it is complicated,” he says. “But the point is, we have to stop being defeated by that complexity.”
So, two years ago, the governor directed his insurance commissioner to exercise a little-used power to turn down a requested rate increase because it was excessive. Not every state has this power.
Insurance companies were outraged. But Dreyfus of Blue Cross Blue Shield now says it was a pivotal point.
“It sent a message to the entire health care community and the business community that we had to change,” Dreyfus says.
And change seems to be happening. Insurers have torn up their contracts with hospitals calling for annual reimbursement increases of 8 percent and 10 percent, and negotiated agreements providing for 3 percent, 2 percent and even zero percent increases.
Blue Cross Blue Shield has persuaded some of the state’s biggest hospitals, and thousands of doctors, to accept a new kind of payment. Instead of getting paid every time they do something â a venerable system called fee-for-service that encourages them to provide more and more services â they’re paid a fixed amount each month for each patient.
That was tried in the 1990s, and it failed, largely because of backlash over its incentive to stint on care. The new wrinkle is that this time hospitals and doctors have to meet 60-some different quality measures to show they’re not cutting back on care.
Dreyfus says a third of his company’s 2.8 million subscribers are now on these so-called “global payment” plans, and he’s hopeful that most of the state will be on this kind of reimbursement within the next two to three years.
The various steps seem to be working to moderate Massachusetts’ historically high health care inflation rates. “We’ve got some more work to do here,” the governor says, “but average premium increases were almost 17 percent two years ago. They are less than 2 percent right now.”
But he doesn’t trust that it will automatically go on that way. Patrick and many others, inside and out of government, say Massachusetts now needs some legislation to lock in these changes and go further â cut down on administrative costs, reform the malpractice system and other innovations.
The big idea you often hear these days is to hold total Massachusetts health spending to a target tied to the state’s overall economic growth.
“I want to assure … that it’s sustainable,” Patrick says, “that we don’t continue to have increases above the rate of growth in the economy.” Otherwise, he says, health care will “eat up everything else.”
Legislators, who are wary of tampering with a health sector that accounts for 20 percent of the state’s economy, are expected to come up with their own proposals this spring.
But significantly, no one is talking about repealing the 2006 law. Not even businessmen like Fred Difinis, who runs a small business selling parts for playground equipment. He’s unhappy with the Massachusetts health plan because it requires him to buy coverage for prescription drugs, which he says he doesn’t need.
“I’m not sure I necessarily want to see the law repealed,” he says. “What I want to see is some balance on the cost side of the equation.”
If Massachusetts can do that, it might become a national model â again.
Alice Waters: Picture Perfect As The Constant Gardener
February 12, 2012
Story By: by Kristofor Husted
Chefs Jose Andres and Alice Waters pose along side her newly installed portrait, by photographer Dave Woody, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, on Jan. 20, 2012.
Alice Waters has moved from the kitchen to the garden to the soap box in her 40 years as a pioneer of the sustainable and locally grown food movement. But on one recent night, The Salt found her “hanging” in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
The chef and food activist was on hand as the museum honored her with a place on the wall for her role as a champion of the food movement. For the portrait, photographer Dave Woody first started snapping Waters in a kitchen. But once they moved her to the garden, the photo really came alive, he says.
In the photo, she poses at a slight angle with a hint of sass. A mulberry tree towers over her, but she’s in command. The portrait now hangs just down the hall from Hillary Clinton and around the corner from Walt Whitman.
As she walks down the hall to our interview, she pauses for a moment at nearly every portrait, puts her hand over her heart and quietly exhales.
“I never was really thinking about this 40 years ago when I opened Chez Panisse,” she says. “I was really thinking about taste.”
Indeed, Waters opened her restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., simply to have a place where she could eat “real” food with her friends. Twenty-four years after that, she started a foundation to get the Edible Schoolyard program up and running. In it, grade-school students in Berkeley build connections between food, health and the environment, by working in the school garden and kitchen.
“If you can bring them into a positive relationship with food when they’re four, they’ll grow up thinking differently about the world around them,” she says. By empowering kids to learn about food, she hopes to reconnect Americans to their health, their farmers and their family dinner table.
José Andrés, who was named the 2011 outstanding chef by the James Beard Foundation, says Waters has shown how a restaurant can act like a Trojan horse when it comes to food-related health issues, like obesity.
“It can infiltrate the mind of a country or infiltrate the political system from within,” he tells The Salt. “We can start finding out today the solutions [to obesity] through the quality of food we feed our children instead of funding the health system 30 years from now.”
Waters isn’t planning on taking a break anytime soon, either. Not only is she writing another book, she’s leading the charge to guarantee every U.S. kid in school a free, healthy meal.
“That’s the ultimate social justice,” she tells The Salt. “They can have breakfast, lunch and an afternoon snack.”
To achieve that goal, Waters wants to build on the Edible Schoolyard program and pair every school in the country with an affiliated garden or farm. Kids could grow real food and cook all year round.
Along with the free meal, Waters says an edible education class, much like a required physical education class, should become an institute in all school curricula. It’s a huge goal for a tiny, elegant woman. But other big-name chefs are stepping into her corner.
“It’s definitely an uphill battle,” D.C. chef Mike Isabella says. “When it comes to … all the different school systems â it’s very hard. But I’ll be a part of the fight.”
Waters says she is planning a pilot program with California Gov. Jerry Brown. When Sacramento, Calif., Mayor Kevin Johnson heard about her idea, he jumped at the chance and offered to start the first school in the state capital, she says.
Her philosophy is not new, she says, but one that is reminiscent of a time before industrialization when people ate foods in season, bought locally and sat down at the table for meals.
“It’s not like I’m talking about something fantastic,” she says. “It’s something that’s in our DNA, in our genes already. We just have to get back to that place. It’s like coming home.”
Where Eye Care Is A Luxury, Technology Offers Access
February 10, 2012
Story By: by Larry Abramson
EyeNetra’s smartphone-based NETRA system can perform an eye exam in roughly two minutes.
A man from Liberia uses a pump to adjust his liquid silicon lens. Liquid-lens glasses are part of an effort to make eyewear more accessible in the developing world.
“Science helps, but I don’t think there’s a substitute for actually checking to see if the patient is satisfied with the refraction that any automated device will find,” Singh says.
EyeNetra says relying on the automated exam can be just as accurate â and makes the exam cheaper and more accessible.
Liquid Lenses
But once patients get their prescriptions, they still have to get the glasses made. EyeNetra’s developers envision a network of providers that would use the prescription to provide the patient with glasses.
But in some places, patients are actually building their own eyewear. The Centre for Vision in the Developing World is collaborating with Dow Corning to make cheap glasses with lenses made of liquid silicon. Dow Corning’s James Stephenson says the glasses are equipped with a little pump that can adjust the shape of this liquid lens.
“The user basically looks through the glasses,” he says. “They cover up one eye, and they literally turn the pump until the object comes into very clear vision.”
The hospital system conducts 300,000 surgeries a year â and about half are free.
An increasing number of patients have problems that significantly impair their quality of life.
An electronic retina can help restore vision to people who’ve been blinded by retinal diseases.
The biggest downside with these glasses â initially called Adspecs â is that they’re pretty clunky looking. The developers are working on a sleeker, more stylish version.
Nothing Beats A Complete Eye Exam
According to their creators, these are promising technologies. But those who work in the developing world caution that many patients don’t even know that they could see better, so they don’t ask for help. And Singh says that when it comes to eye care, it’s also important to go beyond the need for glasses.
According to Singh, these new technologies are “not a substitute for a complete exam that checks the eyes for potentially blinding diseases, like glaucoma and macular degeneration.”
Common Chemicals Could Make Kids’ Vaccines Less Effective
January 30, 2012
Story By: by Jon Hamilton
Even in the remote Faroe Islands, some children have high levels of perfluorinated compounds in their blood. The chemicals may interfere with the immune system.
The more exposure children have to chemicals called perfluorinated compounds, the less likely they are to have a good immune response to vaccinations, a study just published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association shows.
The finding suggests, but doesn’t prove, that these chemicals can affect the immune system enough to make some children more vulnerable to infectious diseases.
For decades now, PFCs have been used in nonstick coatings, stain-resistant fabrics and some food packaging. And because they persist in the environment for years, they have become common around the globe.
“You can find them in polar bears,” says Dr. Philippe Grandjean, the study’s lead author who works at both Harvard and the University of Southern Denmark.
Studies in animals have shown that PFCs can weaken the immune system.
Grandjean wanted to know whether this was happening in children. So he led a team that studied nearly 600 kids in the Faroe Islands, which lie about halfway between Scotland and Iceland.
The Faroese have levels of PFCs similar to those of U.S. residents. Grandjean figured if the chemicals were having an effect, it would show up in the way kids’ bodies responded to vaccinations.
Normally, a vaccine causes the production of lots of antibodies to a specific germ. But Grandjean says the response to tetanus and diphtheria vaccines was much weaker in 5-year-olds whose blood contained relatively high levels of PFCs.
“We found that the higher the exposure, the less capable the kids were in terms of responding appropriately to the vaccine,” Grandjean says. The results raise the possibility that “the immune system is not really developing optimally.”
The health effects of PFCs are still poorly understood. But in the past decade, government scientists have become increasingly concerned about possible links to developmental problems in children.
As a result, the Environmental Protection Agency has taken steps that have resulted in some PFCs being phased out.
These chemicals aren’t as frightening as some found in the environment, says Dr, Alan Ducatman from West Virginia University, which has been part of a large study of a PFC known as C8. “But they are clearly problematic,” he says, adding that the C8 study also found some evidence of an effect on the immune system.
Consumers in the U.S. have reason to be concerned about PFCs, Ducatman says, even though exposure to some of them is falling.
The problem is that levels “are not going down in other parts of the world and in fact there are places where they may even be going up,” Ducatman says.
One of those places is China, says Grandjean. And that’s a problem for countries that buy products from China, he says.
“We may just be importing products with the same compounds,” he says. “So I don’t think that we have solved the exposure problem yet and I think it needs international attention.”
That’s beginning to happen. Some global treaties are beginning to include language restricting the use of certain PFCs.
How To Find A New Nuclear Waste Site? Woo A Town
January 28, 2012
Story By: by Christopher Joyce
An underground train emerges from the entrance to the planned Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in 2006. The government has since abandoned the site as a location for the long-term storage of nuclear waste.
Now the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future has a new plan to find another site. The Obama administration set up the commission after dropping Yucca Mountain.
Commission member Brent Scowcroft says the new plan should be “consent-based” â it must hinge on convincing the public that a new site will be safe.
“It’s psychological,” says Scowcroft, who spent two years with the commission working on a solution. “People don’t understand nuclear waste. The problem itself is solvable.” He notes that other countries, such as Sweden and Finland, have won local approval for permanent waste dumps, and found safe geological sites.
Scowcroft says this worked for the military’s dump site in New Mexico’s salt caverns, near the city of Carlsbad. “Salt is one of the most attractive mediums for permanent disposal,” says Scowcroft. “And we found in visiting there that the people of the region generally are supportive of taking on additional burden.”
The commission, however, wasn’t asked to pick a site, just to set up a process to find one. For decades, the country’s commercial waste has been sitting in “temporary” steel and concrete casks at nuclear power plants. The new plan would finally gather all that waste into interim holding sites while a permanent geological dump is built.
That would require moving lots of radioactive waste around the country. Commission member Lee Hamilton, a former congressman from Indiana, says that’s already being done safely with military waste, but he says people will still be anxious. “When I was in the Congress and the prospect of transporting nuclear waste across southern Indiana came up, it just struck fear into people,” Hamilton recalls.
Thousands of tons of nuclear waste around the U.S. are waiting for a pickup that is decades away.
While the dispute over a permanent storage site drags on, the waste is piling up.
One other thing: The commission would fire the Department of Energy â they say that this time, an independent organization should be in charge of picking a permanent dump site. Says Hamilton: “They have a record of not dealing with the problem successfully. They have lost credibility to do it.”
The nuclear industry definitely wants a permanent dumpsite.
“As we go out and talk in communities about building plants and re-licensing new plants, one of the principal issues they have is, ‘What are you going to do with the used fuel?’ ” says Alex Flint, a vice president of the Nuclear Energy Institute. “And we feel an obligation to solve that.”
Utilities and their customers have been paying a fee for years to the government that’s meant to pay for a waste site. The federal government has reneged on its promise to use that money to take care of the waste. Flint says that’s one reason they’re happy to see the recommendation that DOE bow out.
“Our experience over several decades has simply been that the Department of Energy, because of changes in management, because of the disparate interests of its programs, is not well-suited to run this program,” Flint says.
The anti-nuclear group Beyond Nuclear has weighed in as well, arguing that the interim storage site is a bad idea because it may just become a permanent site.
Drugmakers Boost Prices, Despite Political Risks
January 28, 2012
Story By: by Scott Hensley
AstraZeneca’s Nexium is one of many drugs that had a hefty price increase this month.
A rundown of price increases for brand-name drugs compiled by Richard Evans of Sector & Sovereign Research.
Pupils ‘need nine hours of sleep’
September 25, 2011
Primary school pupils need to have at least nine hours' sleep each night or their capacity to learn will be impaired, say researchers.
The research carried out by the Autonomous University of Barcelona examined the link between sleep and children's intellectual development.
It found that a lack of sleep damaged core skills needed for learning.
The researchers suggest parents should be taught about the importance of sleep for their children's well-being.
The study found that even those children who had eight to nine hours of sleep were more likely to struggle in school compared with children who slept for nine to eleven hours.
This threshold of nine hours as a minimum was based on an examination of the sleeping patterns of 142 six to seven year olds in a range of schools in Spain.
The study found that "memory, learning and motivation" were all disrupted by insufficient sleep or the lack of a regular bedtime routine.
There were also specific problems associated with a lack of sleep, such as in language and writing.
"The lacking hours of sleep distorts children's performance in linguistic knowledge, grammar and spelling rules, and key aspects in the organisation and comprehension of texts, to name a few examples," said Ramon Cladellas, a researcher from the university's psychology faculty.
"They are basic skills, meaning that if the pupil, due to a lack of sleep, develops problems in this area, it could have a repercussion on all subjects."
Mr Cladellas said that parents needed to be made aware of the significance of making sure their children got enough sleep.
"Nowadays, there is great concern because children are glued to the television, computers, and video games, but the same importance is not given to them going to bed at the same time every night."
This is the latest study to make a connection between children's sleep and their capacity to learn and their behaviour in school.
Research from the University of Michigan in the United States, published during the summer, found that school bullies and aggressive pupils were much more likely to be the pupils who did not get enough sleep or who were suffering from sleep disorders.
It suggested that over-tired pupils did not have the "emotional regulation necessary to control aggression".
A previous study of seven and eight year olds in Finland found that the behaviour of sleep-deprived children had many similarities with the behaviour associated with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).
It found that children who slept less than eight hours were the most likely to show this disruptive behaviour.
© 2011 BBC News (www.bbc.co.uk)
WHO reports polio outbreak in China, warns of spread
September 23, 2011
GENEVA |
GENEVA (Reuters) – Polio has broken out in China for the first time since 1999 after being imported from Pakistan, and there is a high risk of the crippling virus spreading further during the annual Haj pilgrimage, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.
Nine cases have been confirmed in China and polio is now considered to have spread nationwide in Pakistan, mainly due to insecurity that has halted vaccination campaigns in areas including the Khyber tribal region, a WHO spokesman said.
“The WHO rates as ‘high’ the risk of further international spread of wild polio virus from Pakistan, particularly given the expected large-scale population movements associated with Umra and the upcoming Haj…in the coming months,” the Geneva-based body said in a statement.
Haj is the main annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, which is due to start in November. Umra refers to other pilgrimages to Mecca, which can take place any time of the year.
© 2011 REUTERS (www.reuters.com)