Categories
Cardiovascular
Diagnostics
Endocrinology
Health Insurance
Medical Devices
Mental Health
Nutrition
Oncology
Public Health
Sexual Health
Popular Articles

Medicare Revamps Competitive Bidding Program
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is preparing to revive competitive bidding program for durable medical equipment that industry members helped sink last summer when it was originally scheduled to take effect, CQ HealthBeat reports. The agency had anticipated a 26 percent savings for wheelchairs, oxygen tanks and other pieces of equipment through the program. But a lobbying group for the suppliers, the American Association for Homecare, successfully urged Congress to shut down the program before it went into effect.
generic viagra online
Classifying Antiabortion-Rights Crimes As 'Terrorism' Unnecessary, USA Today Opinion Piece States
Scott Roeder, who is charged with the murder of abortion provider George Tiller, and James von Brunn, who is charged with last week"s shooting death of a Holocaust Memorial Museum guard, "appear to be murderers, not terrorists," Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University, writes in a USA Today opinion piece. Although "liberals denounced" the tendency of conservatives to call "every possible crime an act of terrorism" while former President George W. Bush was in office, now that there are antiabortion-rights and anti-Semetic suspects, "there is an insistence that these crimes must be treated as terrorism -- as if to call them "murder" or "hate crimes" would diminish their significance," Turley states. Many people who "kill strangers out of hate for their race or religion or some other association" are "loners or rogue operators who seek to satisfy a blood lust against different groups," Turley contends, noting that classifying a crime as an act of terrorism allows for a different types of prosecution, investigation and punishment. According to Turley, the "term "terrorism" once had a clear meaning before it was used as a point of emphasis to evaluate or distinguish certain crimes." The Bush administration"s broadening of the definition to include "any prosecution that disrupts a "potential" terrorism threat" served to further divert the term from its historical definition, he adds. Now, "many want to see terrorism investigations targeting antiabortion activists and other groups that use violent speech," Turley writes."We do not advance our efforts by classifying every hate crime as terrorism," Turley continues, adding that it would be "the terrorists who will benefit from our lack of focus" in the definition. According to Turley, the "fact is that even an authoritarian nation can do little to stop a determined rogue operator from walking into a church and killing someone like Dr. Tiller." Referring to "someone such as Roeder as a murderer does not diminish the crime or the victim" because "we do not have to call murder "terrorism" to take the crime or its causes seriously," Turley writes (Turley, USA Today, 6/17).
News of the day
Intensive In-Hospital Support Doubles Likelihood Of Smoking Cessation In Heart Patients
Patients admitted to hospital with coronary artery disease are twice as likely to quit smoking after receiving intensive smoking cessation support compared to minimal support, found a new study in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).
Sexual Health

An Efficient Approach To Monitoring Gastrointestinal Microflora Changes

Pi-deficiency in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is one of the most common digestive diseases and usually the equilibrium of gastrointestinal microflora are broken, which plays many important roles in the growth, development and performance of the host. Therefore, more clinical interests are arising in monitoring changes of intestinal microflora in intestinal disease and the consequent treatment, especially in TCM therapies. It has been found that some Chinese materia medica have curative effects on regulating the equilibrium of intestinal microflora and therefore promote the recovery of "Pi". However, ways of monitoring the intestinal flora are quite limited, not only because of the complexity of its constitution, but also the difficulty of culturing for most gastrointestinal bacteria in vitro. A research article published on May 14, 2009 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this problem. The research team led by Prof. Li from School of Pharmacy of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, used enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus-PCR (ERIC-PCR), which is a PCR-based molecular method, and utilizes oligonuleotides targeting short repetitive sequences ERIC which are dispersed throughout various bacterial genomes, to study changes of intestinal microflora under Pi-deficiency state and evaluate therapeutic effects of Chinese materia medica. ERIC-PCR have implications in monitoring the effects of various known factors on the complex intestinal microflora community. The article introduced it to examine the changes of intestinal mircoflora of Pi-deficiency disorder with two animal models. They further evaluate the efficacy of four Chinese materia medicas as well as a probiotic and another disease therapy recipe in Pi-deficient rats, and determine if it could be utilized as an initial screening of changes of the composition of bacterial communities. A molecular marker was identified for Pi-deficiency in rats. The pharmacodynamic evaluating system, including identified molecular markers (net integral area and abundance of DNA band), Shannon"s index for diversity of intestinal microflora, and Sorenson"s pairwise similarity coefficient, was established. With application of this evaluating system, four major clinical recipes used for Pi-deficiency therapy in TCM were demonstrated to produce more pronounced recovery activities on the Pi-deficient rats, especially the middle dose (equivalence to the clinical dose), while the higher doses of these recipes did not show a better therapeutic effect even showed some perturbation deterioration of intestinal microflora. Both the fingerprint analysis and the identified marker were demonstrated to distinguish the Pi-deficiency. The identified molecular marker may have application in the screening of active compounds in relative Chinese materia medicas and pharmacodynamic study in Pi-deficiency. Reference: Peng Y, Wang Z, Lu Y, Wu CF, Yang JY, Li XB. Intestinal microflora molecular markers of spleen-deficient rats and evaluation of traditional Chinese drugs. World J Gastroenterol 2009; 15(18): 2220-2227 http://www.wjgnet.com/1007-9327/15/2220.asp Correspondence to: Xiao-Bo Li, School of Pharmacy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200030, China. Lai-Fu Li World Journal of Gastroenterology


Add your comment:
Name:
Site address: http://
Your message:
Enter today\\\\'s date, 2 digits
(spam protection):

© Copyright 2009