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Campaign urges hepatitis B screening

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PALO ALTO -- The campaign battling deadly hepatitis B could not have come up with a better poster child than former California Assemblywoman Fiona Ma.
Ma didn't realize that she suffered from chronic hepatitis B until she appeared at an awareness campaign six years ago -- and a doctor pulled her aside to quietly inform her.
On Sunday, the campaign led by a coalition of groups targeting the disease screened more than 200 people around the Bay Area to mark World Hepatitis Day. The disease affects one in 12 Asian-Americans and one in 10 Asians worldwide.
One-quarter of those people will go on to suffer liver cancer or disease.
"I am lucky today," Ma said. "I am OK."
Many of the dozens of people getting tested at a tutoring center in downtown Palo Alto expressed the public perception of hepatitis B -- that it's a vague problem, not an imminent threat.
But Ma knows better. At age 22, she offered to donate blood but was turned down because she tested positive for hepatitis B. It turned out that her grandmother transmitted the virus to Ma's mother, who transmitted it to Ma and her brother. Hepatitis B is passed on from mothers to newborns -- common in areas in Asia where hepatitis B is endemic -- and also by sex and through needles.
A good service
Ma thought she was merely a silent carrier.
But years later at an event promoting hepatitis B awareness, she learned otherwise. Dr. Sidney So, director of the Stanford Asian Liver Center, told her: There are no silent carriers, only people with active and inactive cases.
Ma immediately sought a liver test and asked family members to do the same. Because of that vigilance, her mother's liver cancer was detected in early stages; she underwent surgery and is now fine, Ma said.
Many of those getting tested Sunday said they vaguely had heard of hepatitis B dangers and had assumed they were OK because they got regularly physicals. But hepatitis B may not be screened in routine blood panels.
"This is a very good service for the community," said Bob Zhang, of Palo Alto, as he pressed a cotton ball on his just-poked arm.
He was recruited by his daughter Lily, a rising senior at Palo Alto High. She was one of dozens of student clients of ThinkTank Learning, a tutoring and test-prep company offering 10 of its Bay Area sites for hepatitis B screening.
Its clientele, 95 percent Asian-American, was the perfect demographic match for hepatitis B testing, ThinkTank founder Steven Ma (no relation to Fiona Ma) said. The company offered its students four hours of community service credit for every adult recruited for screening.
Lily Zhang -- the Olympic table tennis star -- also recruited seven visiting Chinese table tennis players, who said they didn't recall being tested for hepatitis B in China.
A life saver
The campaign sponsors, including Hep B Free Santa Clara County, hoped to help set a world record Sunday for the number of people screened for the disease.
The testing was funded in part by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has launched a vigorous screening campaign. It's been embraced in Santa Clara County, where 33 percent of the residents are Asian-American.
In this country, routine vaccination of newborns and shots for children have cut into the disease among young adults. However, Dr. Jiayi Li of the Palo Alto Medical Clinic said that the vaccine isn't a cure-all. In cases of a heavily infected mother, hepatitis B can survive in inoculated children. In the United States, fewer than half of births to women with chronic hepatitis B occur with prenatal case management.
So the campaign aims to educate medical professionals as well as the general public.
"Please get your family members screened and tested," said Fiona Ma, who gets a liver test twice a year. "You can potentially save someone's life."
Contact Sharon Noguchi at 408-271-3775. Follow her at Twitter.com/NoguchiOnK12.
Hepatitis B numbers
1 in 12: Asian-Americans living with chronic hepatitis B
1 in 10: Asians infected worldwide.
2 of 3: unaware of their infection because they have not been tested
1 in 4: those infected will die from liver cancer or liver disease, unless they get long-term medical care.
READ MORE:http://www.mercurynews.com/

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Bolstering your brain against dementia

00:54 | Labels: ,

The following unsigned editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune on July 19:
For years, the news about Alzheimer’s and other dementia-related illness has been unrelentingly grim. We don’t know many of the causes. We don’t have a cure.
Researchers warned that the number of people with brain-robbing diseases would double in the next three decades as the baby boom generation aged. In other words, if you lived long enough, you’d likely suffer from it.
Finally, however, good news: Dementia rates in England and Wales plunged by 25 percent over the past two decades, according to a recent study in The Lancet.
Another recent study, from Denmark, found that people in their 90s now are mentally sharper than those who reached that age a decade ago. Researchers suspect, but can’t say for certain, that such trends are also afoot in the United States.
Tentative conclusion: That slide into dementia and Alzheimer’s with age may not be inevitable. New theory: Eating right, exercising and cutting out smoking is not only good for your heart and lungs – it may also help forestall dementia.
Dr. Marsel Mesulam, director of the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center at Northwestern University, told us these studies are “very exciting. The field had become pretty depressing with the news that the older you get, the more you lose cognition to the point where this could become almost inevitable if you live long enough.”
Here’s what anyone bent on preserving his or her gray matter into advanced age needs to know: What you eat, how well you take care of your health, how much you exercise could well make a difference.
Researchers say those who keep their blood pressure and cholesterol under control are likely to fare better, possibly because they avoid dementia that is caused by ministrokes and other vascular damage.
Education, too, is associated with lower dementia rates. Those with more education tend to fare better than those with less. (Another good reason to finish high school and go to college.)
You don’t need a Ph.D, says Dr. Dallas Anderson of the National Institute on Aging. But being better educated may guide choices you make over a lifetime that help shield you from dementia.
Make no mistake: Your lifestyle choices matter, and not just for dementia. Researchers reported last year in the New England Journal of Medicine on the impact of high cholesterol, blood pressure, smoking and diabetes on life expectancy.
If you don’t have any of those factors, your risk of dying of cardiovascular disease is amazingly low: 4.7 percent for men and 6.4 percent for women. But if you have at least two of those factors, you have a much higher risk of heart disease or stroke.
Researchers have theorized that keeping the brain active – via crossword puzzles, for instance – would help prevent a mental slide. Some suggested brisk exercise or staying socially engaged helps. Diet? Vitamins? Drugs? So far, there’s no strong evidence that any of these prevent dementia.
Many baby boomers are terrified that their memories are slipping. If you’ve ever walked into a room and forgotten why, you know. If you’ve ever encountered a colleague on the elevator and blanked on his name, you know. If you’ve ever forgotten the end of a sentence while you were writing it.
A sobering story in The New York Times says that some people can detect their slide into early memory loss and dementia before doctors see symptoms or medical tests can detect anything amiss.
Before you panic, please remember our larger point: Following this health advice isn’t a guarantee that you’ll be sharp into your 90s. But those who shrug about these things and say, “it’s out of my hands,” are wrong. The choices you make add healthy weeks, months or years of life, or chip away at them.
“Once the brain goes downhill, it is hard to bring it back,” Anderson told us. Hard to forget that.

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South African chef 'too fat' to live in New Zealand

20:28 | Labels: ,

Authorities in New Zealand have told a South African chef he is too fat to be allowed to live in the country.
Immigration officials said Albert Buitenhuis, who weighs 130kg (286 pounds), did not have "an acceptable standard of health".
He now faces expulsion despite shedding 30kg since he moved to the city of Christchurch six years ago.
New Zealand has one of the highest obesity rates in the developed world, with nearly 30% of people overweight.
Mr Buitenhuis and his wife, Marthie, moved from South Africa to Christchurch in 2007. At the time, the chef weighed 160kg.
Until now, their annual work visas had been renewed with "very little problem", his wife said.
"We applied year after year and there were no issues," she said.
"They never mentioned Albert's weight or his health once and he was a lot heavier then."
But in early May, the couple was told their work visas had been declined because of Mr Buitenhuis's weight.
"The irony is that at the moment he weighs less than when we first arrived in New Zealand and also less than in his first medical, which was accepted by [immigration authorities]," his wife said.
The couple has appealed to New Zealand's immigration minister, citing the chef's recent weight loss.
An immigration spokesman said Mr Buitenhuis's application had been rejected because his obesity put him at "significant risk" of complications including diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.
"It is important that all migrants have an acceptable standard of health to minimise costs and demands on New Zealand's health services," he said.

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Mers: New virus 'not following Sars' path'

20:25 | Labels: ,

The new Mers virus, which has killed half of those infected, is "unlikely" to reach the same scale as Sars, ministers in Saudi Arabia say.
Most of the 90 Mers cases reported so far have been in Saudi Arabia.
Mers is from the same group of viruses as the common cold and Sars, which killed 774 people.
However, a detailed analysis of the Saudi cases,published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, did warn of "major gaps" in understanding of the virus.
The Middle East respiratory-syndrome coronavirus (Mers) emerged in 2012 and has infected 90 people worldwide, 45 of them have died.
The global concern is that cases could spread much further, echoing the Sars outbreak.Cases have been centred on the Middle East - with patients in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Additional cases in France, Germany, Italy, Tunisia and the UK have all been linked to travel to the Middle East.
Researchers in Saudi Arabia have published details of the 47 cases reported in the country.
They suggest a pattern of mostly older men being infected. Most cases were also in people with other medical problems, more than two-thirds of the reported cases also had diabetes.
Low threat
The lead researcher and Deputy Minister for Public Health, Prof Ziad Memish, said: "Despite sharing some clinical similarities with Sars, there are also some important differences.
"In contrast to Sars, which was much more infectious especially in healthcare settings and affected the healthier and the younger age group, Mers appears to be more deadly, with 60% of patients with co-existing chronic illnesses dying, compared with the 1% toll of Sars.
"Although this high mortality rate with Mers is probably spurious due to the fact that we are only picking up severe cases and missing a significant number of milder or asymptomatic cases.
"So far there is little to indicate that Mers will follow a similar path to Sars."
A report earlier this month showed that the virus struggled to spread in people.
However, it and the latest Saudi investigation both highlighted the need to find where the virus was coming from.
Prof Memish's report said: "Reducing the rate of introduction of Mers coronavirus into human beings is unpredictable because the source of the virus is not yet known.
"We are searching vigorously for the source."

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Titsup Apple Developer Centre mystery: Database interloper fingered

04:32 | Labels: ,

Cupertino's silence has led to increasing speculation that the outage was due to a database breach, and has angered programmers who spent a weekend on the Refresh button wondering when the site would return. As Australian Developer Centre user Josh McKinnon blogged: “Apple is a seriously customer-focused company, and they are treating us developers with contempt because we are not their customers.”
Apple has now decided to come clean, to an extent. Macworld is now reporting an e-mail sent to developers:
“Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then.
“In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. We apologise for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon.”
According to Cnet, some users have complained about receiving password reset e-mails, indicating that although passwords were not compromised in the intrusion, the attacker had obtained a number of Apple developer account IDs.
The company has noted that any developers unable to renew their App Store accounts would have their subscriptions extended until the outage is over. ®

Bootnote

A UK-based chap calling himself Ibrahim Balic claims he reported a dozen or sosecurity vulnerabilities in the Developer Centre to Apple shortly before Cupertino yanked the website offline last week. It's believed his discovery was treated by staff as a compromise of the system, but yesterday he denied any wrongdoing and insisted: "This is definitely not a hack attack."

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Apple Said to Buy HopStop, Pushing Deeper Into Maps

10:20 | Labels: ,

Apple Inc. (AAPL) agreed to buy online transit-navigation service HopStop.com Inc., people with knowledge of the deal said, seeking to improve mapping tools after a rocky debut for its directions software last year.
The people asked not to be identified because the deal isn’t public. AllThingsD reported yesterday that Cupertino, California-based Apple is purchasing Locationary Inc., a Toronto-based company focused on business-location maps.
New mapping software Apple debuted in September with the iPhone 5 has been faulted for getting users lost and for its lack of public-transportation directions. HopStop shows users in more than 500 cities the fastest way to travel by foot, bike, subway and car; Locationary deploys real-time data from a variety of sources to help users find featured businesses.
Apple, which touted the map features as a key software change in the iPhone 5, built its navigation application amid a growing battle with Google Inc. (GOOG), which had provided mapping data since the iPhone was introduced in 2007. Apple built the replacement app in part because it wanted to scale back its relationship with Google, not because of any product flaws, two people familiar with Apple’s mapping product said last year.
Google unveiled its mapping application for the iPhone and iPad in December. Google Maps is the most popular free program in Apple’s App Store. HopStop ranks No. 7 among free navigation tools.
HopStop, based in New York, provides directions for more than 140 major metropolitan areas in the U.S. and six other countries, according to its website.

Maps Battle

Google, seeking to seeking to keep rivals from eroding its lead in mobile-navigation, acquired Waze Inc. last month. The developer, whose mobile app solicits input from about 50 million users to improve directions and display traffic and road-hazard details.
The acquisitions reflect a widening rift between the two companies as they court mobile users.
After Apple introduced its mapping software and met with customer complaints, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook apologized for the “frustration” in September, vowing to improve the program and suggesting alternative apps.
Google has been building out its online mapping software since 2005, using cars and satellites to accumulate data that helps improve its accuracy and reliability. To catch up, Apple can use location data collected from customers using its maps to improve the service. Apple’s map software includes a feedback feature for users to report inaccurate directions and other bugs.

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