plus 4, New Bill Challenges Mammogram Recommendations - CBS 2 KCAL 9 |
- New Bill Challenges Mammogram Recommendations - CBS 2 KCAL 9
- Bombs harder to find when threat is rare - Global Nation
- Game Change - Financial Times
- FDA: BPA affects children; exposure should be limited - PhysOrg
- Follow-up Care: Balancing Vigilance and Faith - HealthCentral.com
| New Bill Challenges Mammogram Recommendations - CBS 2 KCAL 9 Posted: 17 Jan 2010 12:23 PM PST New Bill Challenges Mammogram Recommendations
She has now introduced Senate Bill 836 in response to the California Department of Public Health's decision to change the breast cancer screening eligibility age to 50 under the Every Woman Counts program. New enrollments for screenings have also been suspended until July 2. Funding for the program, which serves hundreds of thousands of low-income women, was cut due to a decline in revenue from the state's tobacco tax. For more information on the Bill, visit Jenny's New Mammogram Law. (© MMX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.) Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Bombs harder to find when threat is rare - Global Nation Posted: 17 Jan 2010 11:48 AM PST CHICAGO—Screeners searching for weapons like guns or bombs are more prone to error when the incidence of such threats is small, US researchers said on Thursday. When people look for something rare—like a gun or knife or an explosive device hidden in a suitcase—they often have trouble spotting it, the researchers found. The reverse is also true. When something is very common, people tend to see it everywhere they look, even if it is not there, said Jeremy Wolfe of Harvard Medical School, whose study appears in the journal Current Biology. "It is clear that if you don't find it often, you often don't find it," Wolfe said in a telephone interview. That means that if you look for 20 guns in a stack of 40 bags, you'll find more of them than if you look for the same 20 guns in a stack of 2,000 bags. "We really want to understand why that is happening," Wolfe said. For the current study, Wolfe and his colleagues worked with the US Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Laboratory. The department sent Wolfe's team images of empty suitcases and images of items typically found in them. "We have software that basically packs bags. It takes an empty bag and throws some clothes in it and maybe some odds and ends—and maybe it throws a gun or a knife in there," Wolfe said. "We either had those show up 50 percent of the time or 2 percent of the time," he said. Then they recruited 13 volunteers to look for guns or knives in the bags. What they found was people were much more likely to spot a weapon when there were a lot of them tucked away in the luggage; but when they were rare, they had much more trouble finding them. "If it shows up 50 percent of the time, in our particular experiments, they missed about 7 percent of the targets that were there. If it shows up on only 2 percent of the trials, they missed about 30 percent of the time," Wolfe said. Scanners need humans "Basically, you'll miss more of them in that big stack than in the little stack," he said. Wolfe said understanding how humans find things was critical to tasks like baggage screening in airports because none of the scanners currently in use—or even the more advanced whole body scanners on order by the US government—can spot risks without the aid of humans. The same is true for other screening tasks, Wolfe said, like mammography screening for breast cancer. "At this point, there is no computer that can look at an X-ray of a breast and say, 'I can tell you with absolute certainty that this is or is not bad.'" Computer systems are quite good at pointing out trouble spots, but they often point out too many potential risks, making it harder for screeners to find the real threats. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Posted: 17 Jan 2010 11:19 AM PST Game Change The delicious thing about this book – its guilty pleasure – is that it transports you to a parallel universe in which everything in the National Enquirer is true. In Game Change, the reader travels with two highly diligent and workaholic reporters – John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, who are both clearly addicted to the human drama of US presidential elections. With the 2007/8 cycle the authors were blessed with America's most gripping electoral pageant in a generation. On the basis of hundreds of off-the-record interviews, the book adds a mischievously gossipy dimension to that drama. Yet what the authors reveal – the delusions, character assassinations and low plottings of some of the most monstrous egos on the planet – elevates our understanding of what happened. It may be personal. But it is not trivial. Among the candidates almost nobody emerges looking better. The one exception is arguably Barack Obama, whose ability to keep his head when all around are losing theirs is almost a freak of nature. So too is his Vulcan-like ability to divorce thought from feeling. Typically, when the bitter primary election between Mr Obama and Hillary Clinton was ending, the young senator was the sole person within his campaign to "harbour no animus" towards his rival. For Mrs Clinton, things were initially different. "It was like a root canal," she told friends after her first meeting with Mr Obama since he had beaten her. "I wanted to throw up." After making a minor comeback to win the primaries in Ohio and Texas and thereby keep the race alive, an exhausted and frayed Mrs Clinton began to sound like Al Pacino: "I get really tough when people f*** with me," she told her staff (many of whom by this stage had taken to hiding under the proverbial table). Just before taking to the stage for a Republican debate, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani and the rest lined up at the urinals and started chatting about how much they disliked Mitt Romney – poking fun at the former Massachusetts governor. A sudden hush descended when they realized he was standing behind them. During the duller moments on the campaign bus, John McCain and his colleagues Joe Lieberman, the renegade Democratic senator, and Lindsey Graham, the Republican from North Carolina, would watch the legendary four-minute YouTube clip of John Edwards vainly fussing over his hair in a TV studio. "Let's look at it again," McCain would suggest then they would roll about clutching their sides. Among the candidates, Mr Edwards comes off the worst – a rampant narcissist whose grip on reality deteriorated as the campaign went on. Mr Edwards also offers a rare example of the National Enquirer getting a story right – one that revealed a mistress, a love child and the obligatory hush money. The mainstream media ignored it. Because she has so much more reputation to lose, the feisty Elizabeth Edwards, who suffers from breast cancer, emerges even worse than her husband. Hitherto depicted almost as a saintly figure, Game Change's release a week ago has put paid to all such illusions. Given her tendency to scream abuse at the lowliest staff, nobody on the Edwards campaign had a kind word to say about her. The most shocking tales are about Sarah Palin, who last week took up a new role as a Fox News commentator, and whose recent book, Going Rogue, is selling in the millions. So uninformed was McCain's running mate that advisors had to give her junior school tutorials on the first and second world wars, Vietnam and the cold war. Palin insisted that Saddam Hussein launched the September 11 attacks. As the depth of her ignorance sunk in, as well as her total lack of interest in rectifying it, McCain's senior staff members were "ridden with guilt over elevating Palin to within striking distance of the White House". Much of the book's publicity has dwelt on the fact that Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, used the word "negro" – although in the context of wanting Obama to be America's first black president. More interesting is what we learn about the candidates themselves: their frailties, egos and almost super-human stamina. At stages, both Edwards and Palin teetered on the edge of breakdowns. One of Edwards' aides even feared he was suicidal. Given the stresses to which candidates are subjected, it is a wonder it does not happen to all of them. As Obama kept telling his staff: "This shit would be really interesting if we weren't in the middle of it." The writer is the FT's Washington bureau chief Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| FDA: BPA affects children; exposure should be limited - PhysOrg Posted: 17 Jan 2010 11:05 AM PST The agency is also working to require BPA manufacturers to report how much of the chemical they are producing and where it is being used so that it can more easily regulate the chemical. Friday's action follows three years of investigative reports by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel into the government's failure to limit the chemical's exposure, despite hundreds of studies that found BPA to cause harm. In a news conference Friday, the agency announced these steps to reduce human exposure to BPA in the food supply. The steps, posted on the FDA Web site, include: • Supporting the industry's actions to stop producing BPA-containing baby bottles and infant feeding cups for the U.S. market; • Facilitating the development of alternatives to BPA for the linings of infant formula cans; and • Supporting efforts to replace BPA or minimize BPA levels in other food can linings. "The FDA is supporting a shift to a more robust regulatory framework for oversight of BPA," FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg announced. More than 6 billion pounds of the chemical are manufactured each year, accounting for nearly $7 billion in sales. The chemical is used to line nearly all food and beverage cans. It is used to make hard, clear plastic for baby bottles, tableware, eyeglasses, dental sealants, DVDs and hundreds of other household objects. The chemical, which leaches into food and drink when it is heated, has been linked to prostate and breast cancer, reproductive failure, obesity, heart disease, diabetes and behavioral problems. BPA manufacturers, however, have maintained it is safe. Indeed, the FDA ruled in 2008 that the chemical was safe for all uses _ a decision based on two studies, both paid for by BPA makers. The Journal Sentinel found that lobbyists for the chemical industry wrote entire sections of that decision. E-mails obtained by the newspaper found that the FDA relied on chemical industry lobbyists to examine the chemical's risks, track legislation to ban it and even monitor press coverage. Linda Birnbaum, who now heads the National Toxicology Program, told the Journal Sentinel in December that people should avoid ingesting the chemical _ especially pregnant women, infants and children. "There are plenty of reasonable alternatives," she said. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Follow-up Care: Balancing Vigilance and Faith - HealthCentral.com Posted: 17 Jan 2010 10:22 AM PST
January 15, 1999 I finished eight and a half months of cancer treatments: chemo, surgery, more chemo, and radiation. Finally, I was done, ready to get back to my normal life. From early March 1998 when I first saw a doctor for my breast symptoms, I had not gone longer than two weeks without a medical appointment.
However, like many breast cancer patients, I didn't feel relieved; I felt adrift; I felt afraid. As an inflammatory breast cancer survivor, I was statistically likely to have a recurrence within two years, so how would I know I was OK without all those doctor's appointments? When patients finish their cancer treatment, they have almost as many fears and questions about appropriate follow-up care as they did about their original diagnosis.
The American Society of Clinical Oncology's guidelines say, "The evidence supports regular history, physical examination, and mammography as the cornerstone of appropriate breast cancer follow-up. All patients should have a careful history and physical examination performed by a physician experienced in the surveillance of cancer patients and in breast examination. Examinations should be performed every 3 to 6 months for the first 3 years, every 6 to 12 months for years 4 and 5, and annually thereafter."
But what about all those imaging tests with the cute names like cats and pets? If you have a friend who had those as part of follow-up treatment after cancer, you may want a machine to tell you all the cancer is gone. If you are uninsured, you may suspect that the doctor isn't ordering those because they are expensive. No, your doctor is following the clinical guidelines for appropriate follow-up care. The only routine imaging test recommended is a mammogram.
What has happened since your friend had all those tests is that studies have found they are not effective in saving lives and that many tests add to the life-time amount of radiation you are getting, which ironically could lead to another cancer. By the time a recurrence is large enough for the scan to pick up, it is sending out other signals like pain or abnormal values in blood work. In some cases, survivors are tested more frequently if they are in a clinical trial or research study, but most breast cancer survivors in Stages I, II, or III do not need routine scans.
As a breast cancer survivor, your job is to show up for every scheduled physical. How often you have them will depend on the stage of your cancer and how you responded to treatment, but the guidelines say you should be checked at least every six months, so speak up if you are not scheduled for an appointment every six months for the first three years.
At your visit, the doctor will poke on your liver, examine your scar, feel all your lymph nodes, and listen to your lungs. You will receive a thorough physical exam to catch swelling or lumps that you may not notice. Your doctor will also ask you questions about other possible symptoms of a recurrence. Blood work will show if there are problems with your liver, lungs, or bones--three of the most likely places for breast cancer to metastasize. If any worrisome symptoms show up, the doctor will then order the most appropriate imaging test. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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