Doctors leaving poor countries in need
Fri, 20 Jul 2007 18:41:50 GMTBy CHRIS TALBOTT, Associated Press Writer
JACKSON, Miss. - While many foreign doctors are drawn to the United States to treat underserved poor and rural areas, some experts and health officials say the physicians are needed more at home.
The call by developing nations to stop the practice of recruiting foreign doctors — the so-called "brain drain" — has been getting louder in recent years.
Dr. Fitzhugh Mullan of George Washington University said the U.S. must stop looking elsewhere to fix its problems. He compared the practice to "poaching" and said it amounts to poor citizenship in the world community.
At least 20 countries export more than 10 percent of their physician work forces to richer nations, Mullan said.
Every doctor that leaves a poor nation leaves a hole that likely won't be filled, he said.
"That creates enormous problems for the country and for the educational and health leaders in the country who are attempting to provide healers," Mullan said.
His research shows that sub-Saharan Africa has lost 13.9 percent of its doctors to the U.S., Britain, Australia and Canada. The Indian subcontinent lost 10.7 percent and the Caribbean 8.4 percent.
There is little reciprocation. The U.S. exports less than one-tenth of 1 percent of its doctors.
While many American doctors don't want to work in poor rural and inner-city areas shunned, the U.S. still has 280 physicians per 100,000 people. But doctor-poor Ghana has two per 100,000, while Zimbabwe, where junior doctors make about $45 a week, is down to one.
Dr. Kgosi Letlape, president of the South African Medical Association, said doctor migration creates a trickle-up effect, of sorts.
"What goes around comes around," he said. "We are in a continuum. What South Africa loses to the developed world, to the United States say, we gain from Uganda."
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Michelle Faul in Johannesburg, South Africa, contributed to this report.
Vendors pitch healthier foods for kids
Fri, 20 Jul 2007 00:24:22 GMTBy ASHLEY M. HEHER, AP Business Writer
CHICAGO - Mark Smith is convinced he can turn a generation of junk-food eaters into die-hard devotees of what he calls "the salsa of this decade." The dynamo treat? Single-serve portions of hummus and it may be coming to a school cafeteria near you.
As the federal government prepares to raise standards for food served in schools, vendors like Smith are rolling out healthier versions of lunchroom favorites. Now there are whole-grain pizzas and baked chicken nuggets, along with new offerings like hummus. It's all part of an uphill — and so far losing — battle to slow rising obesity rates.
Government rules, which limit fat and require certain levels of vitamins and protein, are about to get tougher. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the national school lunch and breakfast programs, will announce changes by the end of the year.
But getting kids to choose broccoli florets over a fries-and-soda combo is a tall order. A recent Associated Press review of school nutrition studies found that classes on healthy foods and menu changes in the lunchroom have had little effect in altering generally bad eating habits of U.S. school kids.
"I've witnessed kids who have a choice of fresh foods and vegetables and other choices and they choose the other choices, because that's what kids do," said Dr. Reginald Washington of Denver, who is on a committee on childhood obesity for the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Kids agree. Sean McCarney, a 12-year-old from North Huntington, Pa., says his peers are "programmed to like fried stuff so it's hard for them to change over."
Food suppliers know that, and they are scurrying to find options that could become lunchroom favorites.
While hawking his hummus and pita chips at this week's School Nutrition Association annual meeting in Chicago, Smith rattled off the health benefits of the garbanzo bean-based dip.
"It tastes really good," he added. But it may not be for everyone, especially young eaters, said the vice president of sales for Ziyad Brothers Importing of Cicero, Ill.
"The name hummus scares them a little bit," he said.
Perdue Farms Inc. can attest to the challenge of developing healthy but still appealing options. When the company tested chicken nuggets with whole-grain breading two years ago, "it came out looking like baked bugs," said Doylene Jones, national sales manager for the company's school food service.
"It doesn't do you any good to make something if the kids are going to throw it in the trash can," she said.
Now the Salisbury, Md., company's most popular school sellers include drumsticks and spicy breaded chicken bites with a partial whole-grain breading that are baked in cafeterias.
To tempt taste buds, many schools hold sampling events for students.
Connie Mueller, a food service director from Bloomington, Ill., has used taste-testing to OK a whole-wheat pizza but nix breaded baked fish. Vegetables often have the most difficult time getting kid approval.
"Sometimes they have to see it, they have to see other people eating it," she said. "Sometimes it's texture, sometimes it's smell."
Some nutrition experts contend that regardless of changes made to items like pizza and chicken nuggets, those choices still aren't the best.
Washington, the pediatrics specialist, is among those who hope schools ditch the bad-food options entirely so children are forced to choose from healthy-only alternatives for at least one meal each day.
Still, he says, "schools shouldn't be given total responsibility" for changing bad eating habits.
And it's a struggle for school systems to buy fresh, wholesome food on tiny budgets.
Whole-wheat bread, for instance, can cost pennies more a serving than traditional white bread. That may not seem like much, until you consider that districts like Janey Thorton's in Hardin County, Ky., must hold their local spending to 85 cents a day per meal.
Despite the challenges, educators say they hope the updated meals introduce children to new foods, like sliced kiwis, blood oranges, and even hummus.
"It's our jobs as adults to teach children how to eat," said Thorton, president of the School Nutrition Association. "We're not going to turn this around overnight. We have to change parents, too. It's going to take everybody."
U.S. agencies probe botulism poisoning
Fri, 20 Jul 2007 00:25:29 GMTBy ANDREW BRIDGES, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Botulism poisoning from commercially canned foods has been virtually eliminated in the United States, making the new cases linked to hot dog chili sauce all the more striking.
On Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration, Agriculture Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were investigating a Castleberry's Food Co. plant in Augusta, Ga., where the suspect product was canned. An equipment malfunction may be responsible for the contamination, the Agriculture Department said.
Four people have been hospitalized; they are expected to survive.
Botulism is a muscle-paralyzing disease caused by a toxin made by a bacterium, Clostridium botulinum. Such bacteria are commonly found in soil.
Typically, commercially canned foods are heated long enough and to high enough temperatures to kill the spores that otherwise can grow and produce the toxin. If canned foods are underprocessed, the bacteria can thrive in the oxygen-poor environment inside the sealed containers.
Food packaged in defective cans, including those with leaky seams, can become contaminated because the bacteria can be sucked into the containers as the product cools, according to health officials.
Indeed, the company experienced a production problem about two months ago, when cans were being overheated — which can cause them to expand enough to allow in contamination — before being cooled, spokesman Dave Melbourne said. Production was halted until the foods being canned at the time could be checked. Those checks found no problems, Melbourne added.
Each year, the CDC records roughly 25 cases of foodborne botulism poisoning. Most involve home-canned foods. Some fermented whale and other traditional foods prepared by Alaska natives also have been implicated in outbreaks.
CDC medical epidemiologist Dr. Michael Lynch said the last U.S. case of botulism linked to commercially sold canned food dates to the 1970s.
One food safety expert said the new outbreak was disturbing.
"It raises concerns that the existing food safety programs that have been functioning are losing ground because of gaps in FDA oversight," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for consumer group Center for Science in the Public Interest.
The FDA's Dr. David Acheson, the agency's lead official on food safety, called the outbreak a rare event.
"Things you can have a great deal of faith in can fail. Mistakes can happen. The critical part is when mistakes happen, the federal agencies get alerted quickly and react to them and contain the problem," Acheson said.
Symptoms of botulism include double or blurred vision, drooping eyelids, slurred speech, difficulty swallowing, dry mouth and muscle weakness that moves down the body. Eventually, paralysis can cause a person to stop breathing and die, unless supported by a ventilator. Botulism is fatal in about 8 percent of cases; most victims eventually recover after weeks to months of care.
Botulinum toxin is extremely potent. Even opening a contaminated can may expose consumers to the toxin if it is inhaled, swallowed or absorbed through the eye or breaks in the skin, health officials said.
Yet small doses of an FDA-approved product made from the toxin are routinely used to paralyze or weaken the muscles that can cause facial wrinkles. The product is best known by its trade name: Botox.
The FDA warned consumers to throw away 10-ounce cans of Castleberry's, Austex and Kroger brands of hot dog chili sauce with "best by" dates from April 30, 2009, through May 22, 2009. Castleberry's, owned by Bumble Bee Seafoods LLC, has recalled the products flagged by the FDA, as well as seven others produced at the same time.
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Associated Press medical writer Mike Stobbe contributed to this report.
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On the Net:
Castleberry's Food Co. recall information: http://www.castleberrys.com/
CDC botulism information: http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/botulism/index.asp
Hospital told to return placenta to mom
Fri, 20 Jul 2007 00:25:47 GMTLAS VEGAS - A woman has won a court fight to keep the placenta after her daughter's birth. She had planned to grind it up and ingest it as a way to fight postpartum depression, but now plans to bury it.
Clark County District Court Judge Susan Johnson granted a preliminary injunction Tuesday, ordering Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center in southern Nevada to return the placenta to Anne Swanson. Hospital officials said they will comply.
The hospital had refused to give the uterine lining to Swanson following the April 12 Caesarean birth of her daughter, with officials calling it contaminated biohazardous waste. The judge ordered the hospital not to destroy the placenta, which was frozen, and ordered that it be turned over to Swanson within two weeks.
Swanson, who was 30 when she gave birth, originally wanted to give her placenta to a friend to be dried, ground into a powder and packed into capsules. She said she now plans to dry, store and eventually bury the organ instead of eating it.
"I hope this brings about a better awareness about the benefits of placenta," she said, citing a theory that placental hormones can help control postpartum blues.
Amy Stevens, system vice president for Sunrise Health, which operates Sunrise Hospital, described the ruling as specific to Swanson. She said the hospital must comply with strict regulations in handling human biohazardous waste.
There is no Nevada law prohibiting hospitals from returning placentas to mothers. But several Las Vegas area hospitals told the Las Vegas Review-Journal the organ is usually destroyed unless a physician designates it for medical tests or a patient seeks it for specific religious or cultural reasons.
