"Health & Medical News"

The University of Victoria’s Centre for Addictions Research has proposed that the Canadian province of British Columbia set prices for beer, wine and liquor based on each product’s alcohol content, the Vancouver Sun reported Jan. 23.

Tim Stockwell, director of the center, said that products with more potential for social harm should be priced higher. “Every day in the paper you read about drink-driving problems, fetal alcohol syndrome, alcoholism and homelessness,” Stockwell. “The science is very clear that what the population does as a whole with regard to drinking affects how many people die each year, how many hospital admissions there are, how many road crashes, how many deformed babies. The list goes on and on, and on.”

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The rising practice of scanning electronic drivers’ licenses at bars and restaurants could be used to track drinking and dining habits, the Jem Report reported Jan. 9.

Technology writer Jem Matzen began looking more closely at the practice of license scanning following an incident at a Houstons restaurant where his license was scanned by a waitress without his permission. “It’s one thing when a government representative scans your driver’s license; it’s another thing entirely when a restaurant does it, and records your personal information in the process,” he wrote.

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A proposed U.S.-funded antidrug plan for Mexico could exacerbate an already dire prison overcrowding problem south of the border, USA Today reported Dec. 6.

Currently, Mexico’s prisons hold about 217,000 inmates in facilities designed for no more than 164,000. But beefing up Mexico’s justice system and sending more drug offenders to prison is a big part of the $1.4-billion Merida Initiative, a pending proposal for greater U.S.-Mexico cooperation in fighting drug trafficking.

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Barack Obama’s frank admissions about use of marijuana and cocaine in his youth could hurt his chances of winning the presidency in a general election against a Republican contender, according to an advisor for rival Hillary Clinton.

CNN reported Dec. 13 that Bill Shaheen, who co-chairs Clinton’s campaign in New Hampshire, said that Republicans will “jump on” Obama’s admissions should he defeat Clinton in the Democratic primary and become the party’s nominee for president.

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Thousands of prisoners convicted of crack-cocaine offenses could see their sentences cut and be released from prison if the U.S. Sentencing Commission makes recent changes in sentencing guidelines retroactive, the Los Angeles Times reported Nov. 12.

A new policy aimed at equalizing penalties for crack and powder cocaine, if applied to past as well as future offenders, would cut an average of about two years off the sentences of 19,500 federal prisoners, which would result in the release of about 2,500 prisoners.

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Following a model established in Vancouver, city officials in San Francisco are considering whether to set up a supervised “safe-injection” site for IV-drug users, KTVU-TV reported Oct. 18.

Officials and addiction experts held a symposium this week on the safe-injection site concept. “Having the conversation today will help us figure out whether this is a way to reduce the harms and improve the health of our community,” said Grant Colfax, director of HIV prevention for the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

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Washington — The nation’s public health system is much better positioned to respond to emergencies than it was five years ago, say local administrators. But they fear recent federal funding cuts will undermine their gains.

Officials point to funding increases that arrived in the post-9/11 era as a big reason for the improvements. Events in the fall of 2001 served to highlight the role public health plays in defending the United States, but departments nationwide struggled to meet the challenge and resorted to such tactics as shifting personnel from disease control to contend with anthrax-tainted letters.

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This technology is still in development and so I have no idea what the cost is going to be. However, without considering costs, this may have potential for use in low resource settings:

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Researchers have found that the probability of the breast cancer gene mutation BRCA among women with a history of breast cancer is greater when the number of older, female relatives in the family is smaller, according to a study in the June 20 issue of JAMA. This finding may challenge the accuracy of some breast cancer prediction models, which may not take family structure into account.

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Baltimore ??“ In a survey of more than one thousand infertility patients with frozen embryos, 60 percent of patients report that they are likely to donate their embryos to stem cell research, a level of donation that could result in roughly 2000 to 3000 new embryonic stem cell lines. Researchers from Duke University and Johns Hopkins University report the startling findings in the July 6, 2007 issue of Science.

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