Written on July 15, 2011 by Jordan Ballard
A coalition of the nation’s largest food makers on Thursday unveiled a plan to set new nutrition standards for foods that can be advertised to children.
The standards include reducing sugar, salt, calories and trans fat and saturated fat.
But, they still fall short of recommendations proposed by the Obama administration in April.
“We have established uniform criteria for participating companies’ child-directed advertising,” Elaine Kolish, vice president and director of the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, which includes such companies as ConAgra, General Mills and Kellogg, said during a Thursday morning press conference.
“These new criteria are challenging, but realistic, goals for further improving the products advertised to children,” she said.
According to Kolish, about one-third of products currently advertised to kids don’t meet the new nutrition criteria.
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Written on July 15, 2011 by Jett Dooley
LONDON (AP) — British police are investigating whether three hospital patients died as a result of receiving saline solution contaminated with insulin.
Detectives were hunting Saturday for the person who tampered with a batch of saline at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, northwest England.
The contamination was discovered earlier this week after a nurse reported a higher-than-normal number of patients with unexplained low blood sugar levels.
Detectives are awaiting post-mortem results to determine whether three patients — a 44-year-old woman and two men aged 71 and 84 — died as a result of the contamination.
Eleven other patients who received the contaminated saline were mildly affected and will be interviewed by police, along with all the hospital’s medical staff.
“(The investigation) is at a very early stage and we don’t know what effect, if any, the solution has had to the well-being of any patients,” said Assistant Chief Constable Terry Sweeney.
“That said, we have someone deliberately contaminating saline in the one place that people should feel they are being most cared for,” he said. “I wa
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Written on July 15, 2011 by Jett Dooley
CT scans to measure lung tumors can be unreliable, potentially leading patients and doctors to believe cancer is growing when it’s not, according to a study.
In principle, that could mean stopping a treatment that is actually keeping the tumor in check, researchers said in the study, which they said was the first to test how reliable lung cancer scans are, and appeared in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
The patient and the doctor both need to understand that small changes don’t necessarily mean much, said Gregory Riely, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Changes of up to 10 percent can happen simply as a result of the inherent variability of CT imaging.
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Written on July 15, 2011 by Jett Dooley
Rash driving is actually a disease, according to a doctor in China, who is now attempting to cure his country of it.
Dr Jin Huiqing has spent nearly three decades trying to figure out why some motorists seem more accident prone than others. He has studied records of thousands of Chinese buses, vans and taxi drivers, put dozens through neurological tests and examined hundreds of blood samples.
And, since last year, he has been trying to find gene markers for bad drivers, ‘The Daily Telegraph’ reported.
“Cars can be fitted with the highest levels of equipment: safety belts, air bags, and so on. Roads can be more regulated. But people, how can you help them become better?
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Written on July 15, 2011 by Jordan Ballard
A mustached tamarin
For any species hoping to survive in the wild, the lifetime to-do list is agreeably brief: eat, mate, defend your turf and, above all, protect your young. It’s that last one that seems the most primally encoded, and for good reason: it’s hardly possible to pass on your genes if your babies die before they’re old enough to have offspring of their own. And yet not only do animals sometimes fail to protect the young of their species they often kill them themselves.
Infanticide is disturbingly common in nature. It’s typically committed by males that take over a pride or pack and kill whatever babies are present to make room for the ones they plan to father.
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