Researchers believe a sort of stomach pacemaker could be a realistic treatment for obesity.In a small study of healthy volunteers, gastric electrical stimulation delivered via electrodes placed in the lining of the stomach, reduced the subjects’ intake of food and water and seemed to delay the emptying of the stomach.

The idea actually goes back about a decade.  Implantable gastric stimulation showed promise as a treatment for morbid obesity when it was first tested in 1995.  Since then, several reports have come out supporting its safety and effectiveness, but some patients do not respond.

Dr. Jiande D. Z. Chen, from the University of Texas in Galveston, and his colleagues found that gastric electrical stimulation can be performed using electrodes placed endoscopically in the stomach lining rather than surgically in the outer membrane of the stomach — which should reduce the possibility of complications.

Also, this approach — which enables doctors to apply temporary stimulation — may be useful for identifying people who respond and are likely to benefit from long-term therapy.

In the new study, reported in the American Journal of Gastroenterology, Chen’s group tested their approach in 12 healthy volunteers.  After the electrodes were placed in the stomach, the team recorded the participants’ food intake, stomach function, and other factors when stimulation was applied and not applied, over three consecutive days.

Compared with sham stimulation, real stimulation was associated with significant reductions in food intake and maximum water intake.  In addition, real stimulation delayed stomach emptying during the first 45 minutes after a meal.

No significant increases in symptoms such as discomfort or nausea were seen with real compared with sham stimulation.

The researchers say the their gastric electrical stimulation technique may help people lose weight, but that wasn’t tested in this study.

With so many obese people suffering out there this would be a welcome treatment. They should add this to the line of Dead Sea Products.

The WHO’s World Health Report 2006 finds that fifty-seven countries have a serious shortage of health workers.  They go on to state that life expectancies in the poorest countries are half of those in the richest nations.

Sub-Saharan Africa has 11% of the world’s population and 24% of the global burden of disease but only 3% of the world’s health workers.

The report also blames Western countries that are “poaching” healthcare staff from these countries.

The WHO is calling for more direct investment in healthcare training and support of health workers.

It says health budgets should increase by at least US$10 per person per year in the 57 countries with severe shortages, to educate and pay for the four million health workers needed.

Wow, talk about a pipe-dream.  I think they should spend more money on educating the populations about birth control.

Researchers say men who smoke a pack of cigarettes or more a day are amost 40 percent more likely to have erectile dysfunction compared to nonsmokers.

“Smoking accelerates atherosclerosis and is a potent risk factor for heart disease. It just stands to reason that what harms blood vessels in one area of the body harms them in other areas, too,” said Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine.

This study, which was conducted by British and Australian researchers, and was reported in the March issue of Tobacco Control.

In the study, the researchers collected data on nearly 8,400 men aged 16 to 59 years who participated in the Australian Study of Health and Relationships.

Of these men, almost one in 10 said that he had had erectile problems lasting a month or more in the past year. More than 25 percent of the men smoked. One in five smoked a pack a day or less, and just over 6 percent smoked a pack a day or more, the researchers found.

The researchers discovered that, compared with nonsmokers, men who smoked one pack or less a day were 24 percent more likely to report difficulties maintaining an erection. Those who smoked more than a pack a day were 39 percent more likely to report erectile difficulties.

So butt out if you want to continue getting it up, now that is a good piece of relationship advice!  Now if they would only come out with Nicorette gum in tart cherry flavour.

Two seperate groups of researchers, in Japan and in Holland, say they have discovered why the avian flu virus is rarely transmitted from one person to another.

The reason, the researchers propose, is that the cells bearing the type of receptor the avian virus is known to favor are clustered in the deepest branches of the human respiratory tract, keeping it from spreading by coughs and sneezes. Whereas Human flu viruses typically infect cells in the upper respiratory tract.

It is their conclusion that the avian virus would need to accumulate many mutations in its genetic material before it could become a pandemic strain, said Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist at the University of Tokyo.

According to a news release approved by Dr. Kawaoka, “The finding suggests that scientists and public health agencies worldwide may have much more time to prepare for an eventual pandemic.”

Dr. Kawaoka’s finding is published in Nature, and a similar finding, by Thijs Kuiken and colleagues at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, appears in this week’s Science.

Flu experts already knew that people who contract the current avian flu virus, a type known as A(H5N1) or H5 for short, are infected in the lower lung.

So here is hope that we will be prepared when the pandemic does strike, if ever.

The most commonly performed surgical procedure in 2005 was liposuction, according to the report, with 323,605 being performed.

The rest of the top five cosmetic surgery procedures in 2005:

also

3.8 million Botox injections given last year were almost five times the number performed in 2000, according to the report.

The other top minimally invasive procedures:

A recent analysis of 13 major studies shows no reduction in bowel cancer rate for people with a fibre-rich diet.

Stephanie Smith-Warner and her colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston examined “prospective” studies in which healthy people were followed to see if their food intake altered their chances of getting cancer. The data covered 725,628 men and women, who were followed for up to 20 years.  About 8000 of these people developed bowel cancer, and it made no difference how much fibre they had eaten (The Journal of the American Medical Association, vol 294, p 2849).

But the new analysis did not include a huge prospective study of 500,000 Europeans in 10 countries, known as EPIC, which was published in 2003 and had completly different results.

Nick Dale, a neuroscientist at the University of Warwick in the UK has developed a new biosensor to warn of oxygen starvation in unborn children which could help prevent women in labour from undergoing unnecessary caesarean sections.

The biosensor works by using an enzymatic reaction to produce a signal in proportion to the amount of hypoxanthine present in a sample. The team hopes to be ready for the human trials in 18 to 24 months.

If widely adopted, the biosensor could lead to a decrease in the number of unnecessary caesareans, Dale hopes. About 23% of 575,900 live births in England were caesareans in 2003 – with more than half of those done as emergencies, according to the UK’s department of health.

This type of new biosensor could eventually be used as a continuous monitor for hypoxia by attaching it to the unborn baby’s scalp.

The U.S. government already has several million doses of an earlier bird flu vaccine, but it was based on a virus sample taken from Vietnam in 2004.  The virus is believed to have mutated significantly since then.

Today U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Leavitt said he had authorized the National Institutes of Health and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to begin working on a second vaccine for humans.  “In order to be prepared, we need to continue to develop new vaccines,” Leavitt said at an immunization conference in Atlanta.