Eideard

According to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, prescription drug overdose deaths in Florida are up a staggering 265% since 2003. But it’s not just the deaths that have Florida officials worried; it’s the births.

“We saw the number of crack babies that died, and this is just another version of that,” Broward County Sheriff Al Lamberti said. “We all need to be concerned.”

According to state health records, 635 Florida babies were born addicted to prescription drugs in the first half of 2010 alone. South Florida doctors and intensive care nurses report an dramatic uptick in babies born hooked on pills that their mothers abused while pregnant.

“They go through withdrawal symptoms,” said Mary Osuch, the head nurse at Broward General Medical Center’s neonatal intensive care unit. “They’re crampy, miserable. They sweat. They can have rapid breathing. Sometimes, they can even have seizures…”

Marsha Currant, who runs the Susan B. Anthony Recovery Center near Fort Lauderdale, says prescription drug addiction overtook crack in 2009 as the main problem afflicting the pregnant women who are treated there…

Currant says new mothers who are hooked on prescription drugs are often reluctant to seek help for fear the authorities will take their babies from them.

“We wanted to have a place where women didn’t have to chose between getting treatment and having their children go into foster care,” she said.

Compounding the problem, women who are addicted to prescription drugs and find themselves pregnant cannot safely go off the drugs without medical supervision. They need to be weaned off slowly, or the baby will go into withdrawal in the womb.

Yes, Florida has a Tea Party governor who made his billions dispensing drugs. He’s so “serious” about the problem that he actually says stuff about it. And had to be dragged kicking and screaming into signing a bill requiring a statewide database tracking pill prescriptions. He calls it an invasion of privacy.

Meanwhile, Florida is the pill center of America. A situation which reflects a lax medical community as a whole – and a governor whose walk-in clinics established the record for the largest fine ever paid for Medicare fraud.

France’s government warned patients to see their doctor if they took a diabetes drug that is believed to have killed 500 people over three decades before it was banned a year ago.

The alert targets Mediator, a drug for overweight people with diabetes that was also used as an appetite suppressant until it was banned in November 2009 over fears it was linked to heart trouble.

“Our message to all those who took Mediator is that they must see a doctor — particularly those who took it for three months over the past four years,” new Health Minister Xavier Bertrand told a news conference.

Drug safety body Afssaps said in a statement: “Analyses by expert epidemiologists estimate that about 500 deaths could be attributable to benfluorex,” Mediator’s active ingredient, since its launch in France in 1976…

Irene Frachon, a doctor who this year published a study warning about the drug, said “Mediator is responsible for a health disaster”. She added that there was no need to panic, however, estimating that one in 2,000 people who took the drug were at risk of serious ill-effects.

“The health authorities were late in withdrawing this drug despite several alerts” about threats it posed to the heart valves, Frachon told AFP…

A Servier spokesman told AFP four patients had lodged complaints about Mediator since 2009 and that 500 deaths represented a tiny risk compared to the number of people who took the drug.

“But in terms of brand image, it’s disagreeable,” he added.

Oh, well. We can all understand that. Image is so important.

She caught whooping cough – her infant son died
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

California health officials say a tenth baby has died of whooping cough in the state’s worst epidemic in 55 years.

The 6-week-old baby died last week after being treated at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego…

More than 5,270 cases of the highly-contagious illness have been reported in California this year. The previous record was set in 1955 when there were 4,949 cases reported.

All of the babies who have died were too young to be fully immunized against the disease, according to health officials.

Whooping cough is a highly contagious, cyclical illness that peaks in number of infections every five years. The last peak occurred in 2005 when California reported 3,182 cases, with 574 hospitalizations and seven deaths…

Jonathan Fielding, the county’s health director, urges parents and caretakers to get vaccinations to avoid any more deaths…

What the anti-vaccination nutballs don’t get is that those who may be outside the effective zones of infection also need to be vaccinated to inhibit transmitting the disease to the most vulnerable. This is something that’s been accepted medical practice since the days of Jenner – when the sum of peer review determined which disease vectors needed to be inhibited by any means. Vaccination happens to be just one of those that is most effective.

Individuals, whether caregivers or parents who refuse vaccination, decide to be Good Germans. They don’t set out to harm anyone else by their self-important act of “freedom”. Neither does the fool who drinks and drives. Both classes of egregious behavior serve in practice to put others in danger.

Health officials say most kids are once again susceptible to the disease by middle school.

A booster dose of the vaccine is recommended for people between the ages of 11 and 18, as well as for people who have contact with infants.

BP, TransOcean, Halliburton
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BP was aware of equipment problems aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig hours before the explosion pumped millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, a congressional hearing was told yesterday .

In a second day of hearings, the House of Representatives’s energy and commerce committee said documents and company briefings suggested that BP, which owned the well; Transocean, which owned the rig; and Halliburton, which made the cement casing for the well, ignored tests in the hours before the 20 April explosion that indicated faulty safety equipment.

“Yet it appears the companies did not suspend operations, and now 11 workers are dead and the gulf faces an environmental catastrophe,” Henry Waxman, the chair of the energy and commerce committee, said, demanding to know why work was not stopped.

The committee heard testimony from oil executives suggesting multiple failures of safety systems that should have given advance warning of a blowout, or should have promptly cut off the flow of oil.

The failures included a dead battery in the blowout preventer, suggestions of a breach in the well casing, and failure in the shear ram, a device of last resort that was supposed to cut through and seal the drill pipe in the event of a blowout.

Nothing has changed since I worked in the offshore oil drilling industry, decades ago. Preventive technology has improved. The willingness of corporate bosses to take a position on the side of safety – still appears to be non-existent.

Some 30 people were sent to trial Monday on manslaughter charges in the 2007 hospital deaths of eight heart patients in southern Italy mistakenly given laughing gas instead of oxygen.

Doctors, anaesthetists, suppliers, technicians and local health officials will stand trial on July 2 for a pipe-fitting blunder that led to the deaths in a coronary intensive care at Castellaneta near Taranto in Puglia between April 20 and May 4, 2007.

The defendants are variously charged with manslaughter, negligence, supplying mistaken materials and administrative violations…

Among the key defendants are staff and executives of the Puglia-based company Ossitalia, which specialises in the installment of medical gas equipment.

Doctors say the patients’ deaths initially failed to arouse suspicion because they were all elderly and in frail condition.

Just what I need to inspire confidence in medical care for old geeks like me.

Now, I get to worry about getting the wrong gas.

According to figures made available to DawnNews by senior Pakistani military officials, at least 30 thousand Pakistanis have lost their lives or were injured since 2003.

More Pakistanis have lost their life in the ongoing war against terror compared to two full scale wars against India in 1965 and 1971.

The casualties include death or injures to at least 22 thousand civilians and policemen in various acts of terror or suicide bombings.

Pakistan’s military, which launched operations against the militants in the tribal areas, suffered at least 8 thousand casualties, including at least 23 hundred officers and soldiers who lost their lives.

What is there to say?

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

December was the first month since the beginning of the Iraq war in which there were no U.S. combat deaths, the U.S. military reported…

“That is a very significant milestone for us as we continue to move forward, and I think that also speaks to the level of violence and how it has decreased over time,” said Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

Since the beginning of the war more than six years ago, 4,373 U.S. military members have died — 3,477 from hostilities and 898 in non-combat incidents…

Combat fatalities have decreased significantly since June, when the United States started withdrawing troops from Baghdad, Iraq’s capital, and other urban areas. The United States also started a troop drawdown in 2009 from about 160,000 to the current level of around 110,000…

Casualties also have decreased among Iraqis, with Interior Ministry officials reporting in late November that the civilian death toll fell that month to its lowest level since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion…

In December, the ministry said, 306 Iraqi civilians were killed and 1,137 were wounded; 13 Iraqi soldiers were killed and 32 were wounded. Also in December, 48 Iraqi police were killed and 119 were wounded.

President Obama has said he plans to withdraw all U.S. combat forces from Iraq by August 2010 and all remaining troops by December 2011. Britain, the United States’ major ally in Iraq, ended combat operations in April.

It will take decades for the people of Iraq, the citizens of the Middle East, the rest of the world to begin to think kindly of a nation that led us all into the 21st Century – by invading another, much smaller nation out of greed and avarice, supporting the whole process on lies clearly recognized by most of the educated world.

It has always been so. No reason to think times have changed. Or that the citizens of this imperial land have learned much of anything from the process.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

In remarks to scholars, national security experts and the media at the Brookings Institution, Admiral Mullen said that the American air strikes that killed an undetermined number of civilians in Afghanistan’s Farah Province two weeks ago had put the U.S. strategy in the country in jeopardy.

“We cannot succeed in Afghanistan or anywhere else, but let’s talk specifically about Afghanistan, by killing Afghan civilians,” Admiral Mullen said, adding that “we can’t keep going through incidents like this and expect the strategy to work.”

At the same time, Admiral Mullen said, “we can’t tie our troops’ hands behind their backs.”

Admiral Mullen’s comments on the civilian casualties from the Farah air strikes, which have caused an uproar in Afghanistan, reflect deep concern within the Pentagon about the intensifying criticism from Kabul against the American military. Admiral Mullen, who noted that commanders in the region had in recent months imposed more restrictive rules on air strikes to avoid civilian casualties, offered no new solutions in his remarks. He only said that “we’ve got to be very, very focused on making sure that we proceed deliberately, that we know who the enemy is…”

Colonel Julian said at the peak of the fighting that day, some 150 Afghan soldiers and 60 Afghan police, along with their 30 American trainers, as well as two Marine Special Operations teams that made up a quick-reaction force, were battling about 300 militants, including a large number of foreign fighters…

The Fog of War gets thicker and thicker. From my cyber-viewpoint it isn’t easy to discern which of several causes are real and which are fiction.

But, from personal experience, I have even less confidence in casualty figures from tribal villages and what passes for Taliban insurgent tactics. Imperial armies always claim anti-civilian tactics by their enemy. Even when I know there is some likelihood of truth, there have been so many decades of crying wolf, I find it hard to credit the “official story”.

Lightning strikes have killed about 50 Cambodians in the first four months of the year.

The number of such deaths was up from the same period last year, said a deputy head at the National Committee for Disaster Management, Ly Thuch, without giving a comparable figure for 2008.

At least 95 Cambodians were killed by lightning last year, more than double the 2007 total and the highest-ever annual tally in the country.

“We have noticed that the climate has changed and there have been so many lightning strikes,” Ly Thuch said, adding that 10 people were killed by lightning last week alone.

The United States generally has 80-90 lightning deaths a year. Cambodia is about the size of Missouri. People got to get off their tractors when a storm comes up. Or something. They had three footballers killed at once in a match in a storm.

The number is outrageously high.

Hindu festival of Naag Panchami
Daylife/Reuters Pictures

More than 400,000 people are poisoned by snakebites worldwide each year and 20,000 of them die, with most cases occurring in the poorest countries, researchers say.

In an article published in Public Library of Science Medicine, the researchers said the burden from snakebites was highest in South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Data on snakebites is far from comprehensive as most of them happen in places with poor healthcare systems and where record-keeping is generally poor or non-existent.

These figures may be as high as 1,841,000 envenomings and 94,000 deaths…India has the highest figures — with 81,000 envenomings and 11,000 deaths each year, followed by Sri Lanka with 33,000 envenomings, Vietnam (30,000), Brazil (30,000), Mexico (28,000) and Nepal (20,000).

Cripes. I’m nervous enough about the one or two rattlers every year that I bump into on my walks.