INDIANAPOLIS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–HCC Medical Insurance Services, LLC (HCCMIS), a provider of worldwide medical insurance, released a Guide to Zombie Survival ahead of the Halloween season. HCCMIS wants you to be prepared for survival. The guide describes popular zombie types, zombie infection degrees and must haves of a zombie invasion kit.
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MINNETONKA, Minn.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–In observance of Falls Prevention Awareness Day Sept. 23, UnitedHealthcare is urging people to know the risks associated with falling and is encouraging older Americans to take simple yet essential steps to reduce fall injuries. Read more…
In response to confirmed cases of swine flu in Mexico, Canada, and the United States, European Union health officials are advising against travel to North America. At airports in Japan and several other Asian countries, thermal scanners are being used to identify fever among passengers from North America.
But in the U.S. the disease is already among us. The severity and extent are unknown. The SARS outbreak (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003 teaches that rigorous infection control in hospitals may be key to limiting deaths from swine flu in the U.S. Much will depend on what hospitals do when the first seriously ill victims arrive.” If hospitals have effective infection controls in place, the disease can be prevented from spreading to visitors, healthcare workers and their families,” warns Betsy McCaughey, Ph.D., and Chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths (RID), a national organization that educates the public and medical community about preventing infection. McCaughey explains that “77% of the people who contracted SARS in the Canadian outbreak were patients, visitors or workers in hospitals. SARS was almost entirely a hospital infection epidemic.”
SARS — four letters that filled the headlines in the spring of 2003, and then disappeared. “A report issued after the fact by the government of Ontario (The SARS Commission, Spring of Fear, December 2006) shows how hospitals in one city thwarted an epidemic while hospitals in another city made deadly mistakes” says McCaughey, an expert on preventing infection.
Many hospitals in the U.S. are under-prepared for a similar challenge. As many as ten percent of patients contract infections in the hospital, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Bacteria such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and Clostridium difficile race through hospitals, spread by unwashed hands and unclean equipment. How can hospitals that are failing to prevent ordinary infections spread by touch contain a new, unknown virus that can spread whenever someone coughs or sneezes?
“The best defense against swine flu and other unknown pathogens is rigorous hospital hygiene and routine infection prevention. That is the lesson of SARS,” says McCaughey.
Dr. McCaughey is available to speak about the precautions that should be taken in hospitals, schools, day care centers, nursing homes and other places where the disease can spread easily.
Betsy McCaughey, Ph.D., is founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and former Lt. Governor of New York State.
About 10% of women, or about 6.1 million women between the ages of 15 and 44 in the United States, have difficulty getting pregnant or staying pregnant according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Between 10% and 15% of recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage reports the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) in an ACOG Practice Bulletin (#24) in 2001, which was reaffirmed in 2008.
Undiagnosed celiac disease increases the risk of miscarriage by 800-900% according to a Celiac Sprue Association USA, Inc. Fact Sheet. Couples struggling with infertility can get help in the form of a new video and tip sheet offered by motivational speaker and author, Lisa A. Lundy, which you can download free from her website.
And just who is Lisa A. Lundy to be talking about infertility tips? In 1994 and 1995 Lundy had a fibroid tumor in her uterus that was over 19 centimeters in size, which equates to being about 8 times larger than the normal size of the uterus itself. In cases of fibroid tumors of this size, which is in the 95th percentile, a complete hysterectomy is the most likely outcome of a myomectomy, the surgery to remove the fibroid. Lundy sought out the skills of a highly trained surgeon, one who routinely did myomectomies of this size, and increased her chances of keeping her uterus.
While Lundy missed having a hysterectomy by a hairline according to the surgeon, most of the tissue needed to support a pregnancy was removed during surgery, leaving her as a patient that was unlikely to be able to carry a baby to term. Lundy surprised the three physicians working with her, her OB-GYN, the neonatologist, and the surgeon who had removed the fibroid, by not only carrying her baby to term but also by growing back her uterine tissue to normal thickness – something that medical science can not explain.
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