In an article about google releases search term data to the CDC for tracking possible flu outbreaks weeks before ti gets data from doctor’s offices, I was surprised to see a figure that suggest 35 – 40 percent of internet searches begin with looking for health information. This makes sense for many reasons, but the figure is higher than I expected.

The article from Reuters…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Search engine giant Google launched a new tool on Tuesday that will help U.S. federal health experts track the annual flu epidemic.

Google Flu Trends uses search terms that people put into the Web-based search engine to figure out where influenza is heating up, and notify the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time.

“We’ve discovered that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity,” Google said in a statement.

“What this does is it takes Google search terms of influenza-like illness and influenza and it emulates a signal that tells us how much influenza activity there was,” Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at the CDC, said in a telephone interview.

Studies indicate that between 35 and 40 percent of all visits to the Internet are begun by people looking for health information. When people are sick, they tend to look up their symptoms.

Google is keeping the search terms it uses private, but influenza-like illnesses include symptoms such as fever, muscle aches and cough. Sneezing usually occurs with other viruses such as rhinoviruses.

Currently, the CDC relies on centers that report on people coming to their doctors with flu-like symptoms, and lab tests that confirm whether a patient has influenza.

But many people with flu never visit a doctor and most doctors treat based on symptoms, rarely giving a flu test.

Either way, the CDC’s surveillance data is about two weeks behind.

The Google tool will track flu activity in near real time, the company said.

EARLY WARNING

“One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data,” Finelli said.

“The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used … as early warning signal for flu activity.”

Then the CDC can get the word out to hospitals, clinics and doctors offices so they can stock up on flu tests, antiviral drugs and antibiotics for people who get what are known as co-infections — bacterial infections that worsen a bout of flu.

Two weeks warning also allows people to get vaccinated before flu reaches their community.

Google is not charging for the service. “They are giving it to the world for free,” Finelli said.

Google said it would keep individual user data confidential. “Google Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week,” the company said.

“We rely on millions of search queries issued to Google over time, and the patterns we observe in the data are only meaningful across large populations of Google search users.”

Influenza kills an estimated 36,000 people a year in the United States and 250,000-500,000 globally.

Experts are keen to track flu activity in case of a pandemic — a global epidemic of a new and deadly strain of flu that could kill millions within a few months.

(Editing by Will Dunham, editing by Jackie Frank)

AT&T, Tenn. create medical info exchange
from yahoo news / AP
By ERIK SCHELZIG, AP Business Writer 28 minutes ago

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – AT&T Inc. is partnering with Tennessee to provide the country’s first statewide system to electronically exchange patient medical information, the telecommunications company said Monday.

The system is designed to securely transmit detailed patient information between medical professionals. It will allow doctors to access medical histories, prescribe medicines over the Internet and transfer images like X-rays, MRIs and CT scans.

“As patients we really want our information to be available to physicians whenever and wherever they’re needed,” said Diane Turcan, director of health care marketing for AT&T in Atlanta. “And we certainly don’t want to be copying paper records.”

Tennessee’s program is seen as a model for other states and may be a springboard for interstate information sharing networks in the future, she said.

Doctors can use the system to remotely evaluate patients in rural areas who have less access to medical facilities. It will also link to the state Department of Health for access to the immunization and disease registry, death certificate processing and medical license renewals.

Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, who ran HealthAmerica Corp. before becoming a politician, has championed electronic records because of the inefficiency of the current paper-based system.

“If patients’ medical history and record of care are available to their hospital, laboratory, pharmacy or physician, then they will ultimately receive better and more cost-effective medical care,” Bredesen said in a written statement.

AT&T is developing a private portal within the secure network it already provides for state agencies in Tennessee. Turcan said AT&T’s investment in the portal has been “significant” but declined to elaborate.

Antoine Agassi, director and chairman of the governor’s eHealth Council, said Tennessee’s deal with AT&T should keep costs down for individual subscribers. Doctors can apply for state grants to defray the costs of getting set up on the system.

“Having the ability to get this from a pre-negotiated service level at a very, very competitive rate is a huge step forward,” he said.

The state and AT&T will spend most of this year fine-tuning the system and hope that consumers will begin to notice a change by the end of 2008, Agassi said.

Doctors report transplant breakthrough
From yahoo news / AP
By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer
LOS ANGELES – In what’s being called a major advance in organ transplants, doctors say they have developed a technique that could free many patients from having to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives.

The treatment involved weakening the patient’s immune system, then giving the recipient bone marrow from the person who donated the organ. In one experiment, four of five kidney recipients were off immune-suppressing medicines up to five years later.

“There’s reason to hope these patients will be off drugs for the rest of their lives,” said Dr. David Sachs of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who led the research published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.

Since the world’s first transplant more than 50 years ago, scientists have searched for ways to trick the body to accept a foreign organ as its own. Immune-suppressing drugs that prevent organ rejection came into wide use in the 1980s. But they raise the risk of cancer, kidney failure and many other problems. And they have unpleasant side effects such as excessive hair growth, bloating and tremors.

Eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs is “a huge advance,” said Dr. Suzanne Ildstad, a University of Louisville immunology specialist who had no role in the work.

“It still needs some fine-tuning so that everyone who gets treated gets the same consistent outcome … It’s not the holy grail of tolerance yet,” she cautioned.

The results do not mean that it is safe for current transplant patients to go off their medicines. Doing so could lead to organ rejection and even death, doctors warn. And Sachs said the treatment will not solve the country’s organ shortage.

In the 1990s, Sachs showed the treatment could work in a kidney recipient who was a good genetic match. The woman, who had an organ and marrow transplant in 1998, has not needed anti-rejection drugs for a decade.

The new study involved five people who got kidneys from parents or siblings who had slightly different tissue types from the patients. Since many kidney transplants are similarly mismatched, there is hope more people might one day be spared immune-suppressing drugs.

The breakthrough has changed the life of a Los Angeles man who was one of Sachs’ patients.

Derek Besenfelder was born with a genetic kidney disease. After a year on dialysis, he decided to enroll in the experiment and received a kidney and marrow transplant from his mother in 2005. He took anti-rejection pills for eight months, but then was weaned from them. He has been drug-free for two years.

“I wanted to be off the drugs as soon as possible. I had this huge bloated face and didn’t feel comfortable going out in public,” said Besenfelder, 28, who works as a communications director for a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon.

Doctors have experimented with giving marrow before, during or after organ transplants, while also tinkering with patients’ immune systems to prime them to accept the new organs.

Sachs’ treatment involved weakening each kidney patient’s immune system with intravenous drugs several days before the transplant. After the transplant, the patient got an infusion of marrow from the donor to create a new immune system.

The stem cells from the marrow reprogram the body by allowing new immune cells to grow that don’t try to attack the donated organ.

The patients took anti-rejection drugs but were weaned several months later.

Four of the five patients developed a hybrid immune system — where recipient and donor cells live together in the body — for a short time. They were able to stop taking anti-rejection drugs and had healthy kidney function two to five years later.

In the one case that failed, the patient had a second kidney transplant and has been on medications since.

Some researchers such as Ildstad believe the “home run” breakthrough will come when more people respond to the treatment and keep the mixed immune system permanently.

Transplant pioneer Dr. Thomas Starzl of the University of Pittsburgh said donor cells appeared to persist in the bodies of the successful transplant recipients even if those cells were not readily detected.

As promising as the treatment is, Sachs said it won’t solve the country’s organ shortage problem. Nearly 98,000 people are on the waiting list, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.

The study was funded by the Immune Tolerance Network, an international consortium of federal and advocacy groups. Sachs plans a follow-up study involving 15 to 20 patients at Massachusetts General and other hospitals.

In the same issue of the New England Journal, Stanford University doctors reported successfully inducing tolerance to a donor organ in a man who was born with one kidney.

Larry Kowalski, now 50, received a matching kidney and marrow from his brother in 2005 and was weaned off drugs six months later. He has been off medications for two years.

Unlike the Massachusetts General cases, doctors said Kowalski has maintained an immune system from his own cells and his brother’s. The research was funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

___

On the Net:

New England Journal of Medicine: http://www.nejm.org

Girl switches blood type in first-known case
Found Via Now Public

An Australian girl spontaneously switched blood groups and adopted her
donor’s immune system following a liver transplant in the first known
case of its type, doctors treating her said Thursday. Demi-Lee Brennan was aged nine and seriously ill with liver failure when she received the transplant, doctors at a top Sydney children’s hospital told AFP.

Nine months later it was discovered that she had changed blood types and her immune system had switched over to that of the donor after stem cells from the new liver migrated to her bone marrow.

She is now a healthy 15-year-old, Michael Stormon, a hepatologist treating her, told AFP. Stormon said he had given several presentations on the case around the world and had heard of none like it.

“It is extremely unusual — in fact we don’t know of any other instance in which this happened,” Stormon told AFP from the Children’s Hospital.

“In effect she had had a bone marrow transplant. The majority of her immune system had also switched over to that of the donor.”

Source: news.yahoo.com

Today I was forwarded a news story that touched my heart. As much as I want to focus on the future of health care, advances in science and technology, and future possibilities for humans everywhere, a story like this, even though it reflects old health technology, needs to be shared.

From yahoo news / Reuters

Worms infect more poor Americans than thought

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor Tue Dec 25, 8:13 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Roundworms may infect close to a quarter of inner city black children, tapeworms are the leading cause of seizures among U.S. Hispanics and other parasitic diseases associated with poor countries are also affecting Americans, a U.S. expert said on Tuesday.
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Recent studies show many of the poorest Americans living in the United States carry some of the same parasitic infections that affect the poor in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, said Dr. Peter Hotez, a tropical disease expert at George Washington University and editor-in-chief of the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Writing in the journal, Hotez said these parasitic infections had been ignored by most health experts in the United States.

“I feel strongly that this is such an important health issue and yet because it only affects the poor it has been ignored,” Hotez said via e-mail.

He said the United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars to defend against bio-terrorism threats like anthrax or smallpox or avian flu, which were more a theoretical concern than a real threat at present.

“And yet we have a devastating parasitic disease burden among the American poor, right under our nose,” Hotez said.

He noted a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presented in November, found that almost 14 percent of the U.S. population is infected with Toxocara roundworms, which dogs and cats can pass to people.

“Urban playgrounds in the United States have recently been shown to be a particularly rich source of Toxocara eggs and inner-city children are at high risk of acquiring the infection,” Hotez wrote, adding that this might be partly behind the rise in asthma cases in the country. Up to 23 percent of urban black children may be infected, he said.

“Because of its possible links to asthma, it would be important to determine whether covert toxocariasis is a basis for the rise of asthma among inner-city children in the northeastern United States,” he added.

“Cysticercosis is another very serious parasitic worm infection … caused by the tapeworm Taenia solium, that results in seizures and other neurological manifestations,” Hotez wrote.

He said up to 2,000 new cases of neurological disease caused by tapeworms are diagnosed every year in the United States. More than 2 percent of adult Latinos may be infected, and with 35 million Hispanics in the United States, this could add up to tens of thousands of cases, Hotez said.

“In the hospitals of Los Angeles, California, neurocysticercosis currently accounts for 10 percent of all seizures presenting to some emergency departments,” he wrote.

“We need to begin erasing these horrific health disparities,” Hotez wrote in the paper, available online at http://www.plosntds.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pntd.00 00149.

(Editing by Alan Elsner)

How long before we eradicate these simple things out of our lives. It bugs me that there are so many simple health issues going undiagnosed and untreated, when we have had the technology for years.

Today I am posting the post. There have been many health related things in the news the past so many months that I have wanted to write about. Today I finally get to make the posts begin!

I am going to point out a cool story about 2 people receiving liver transplants from the same liver.

From yahoo health news / AP

2-for-1 liver transplant saves two

March 19, 2007 03:47:03 PM PST

The transplant surgeon had good news: A donated liver was on the way for critically ill Maggie Catherwood. Then he asked: Would she let doctors cut off part of her new liver to share with an equally sick baby?

“I can’t imagine anyone saying no,” the 21-year-old college student said last week as, teary-eyed, she met 8-month-old Allison Brown, carefully cuddling the wide-eyed baby so as not to bump each other’s healing incisions.

Actually, few ever get the choice — something the nation’s transplant network soon may change. There’s a push to increase liver-splitting that could have many more people who are awaiting transplants being asked to share a piece of their new organ.

If the proposed changes are enacted, “I think it’s safe to say we could nearly eliminate death on the pediatric liver waiting list,” said Allison’s surgeon, Dr. Thomas Fishbein of Georgetown University Hospital.

A liver is unlike any other organ: A piece of a healthy one can grow into a whole organ in about a month. That’s why some people receive liver transplants from living donors who have just a portion of their organ cut out and given away.

Split-liver donation is different. It divides an organ donated when someone dies, to try to save two lives with one donation.

It doesn’t happen very often, accounting for between 2 and 3 percent of the more than 6,000 liver transplants annually. Just 123 split-liver transplants were performed in the U.S. last year, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which runs the transplant system.

Particularly rare, says Fishbein, is an adult agreeing to share a liver that the waiting-list rules deem completely his or hers. Usually when a liver is split, an organ too large for a baby or small child had to be cut to fit anyway — and pediatric surgeons who don’t want to waste the rest offer it to the next candidate on the waiting list.

“I didn’t even know it was possible” to split a liver, said Catherwood. But she said yes, and her first question upon waking up from surgery was, “How’s the baby?”

“The fact that someone else was willing to give up part of that liver they need is amazing to me,” said Terri Brown, Allison’s mother, in an emotional meeting with Catherwood 12 days after the transplants.

“Oh, she’s adorable, oh my gosh!” exclaimed Catherwood from her wheelchair as Allison’s father, Brian, handed her the baby, tiny white dog slippers peeking from beneath her blanket.

Not every transplant center has the expertise or incentive to split livers, especially those that treat only adults. It’s a more technically challenging operation. It poses a slightly higher risk of post-surgery complications, such as maintaining the good blood flow necessary for the organ to survive.

Nor is every donated liver splittable. It must be a very healthy organ, not the marginal ones often transplanted; typically, the donor was a young adult who died from an accident.

But a rough estimate from the United Network for Organ Sharing is that more than 1,000 livers donated a year might qualify for splitting. Fishbein is part of a the network committee charged with spurring those transplants to try to save more youngsters. Between 10 percent and 13 percent of young children die while on the liver waiting list, including 41 babies last year.

Pending proposals would mandate that all transplant centers be notified when a potentially splittable liver is donated, and that the search for a matching recipient identify those willing to accept a partial organ.

“This is a really important topic,” said Dr. George Mazariegos, transplant chief at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who says liver-splitting today is too dependent on individual surgeons.

“We want to take it to … a national type of initiative where it’s always thought of and always considered when there are certain criteria that are met.”

Catherwood’s symptoms started in the fall, when suddenly she couldn’t keep food down. The day after her 21st birthday, she learned she had Wilson’s disease — her liver couldn’t properly dispose of the copper in food. The quiet buildup was destroying it. In early February, the Sterling, Va., woman joined the nearly 17,000 people on the waiting list for liver transplants.

Allison was 3 1/2 months old when doctors discovered her worsening jaundice meant biliary atresia — the Waldorf, Md., girl was born without all her major bile ducts. She joined the transplant list in early December, the whites of her eyes turning canary yellow as the months ticked by and her liver shut down.

Livers are distributed to the sickest patients first. Late on Feb. 27, Georgetown’s Dr. Cal Matsumoto got word that the transplant network had flagged Catherwood to receive a liver from a teenager who had just died. Knowing Allison was a match, too, he broached the two-for-one transplant.

Most surgeons insist on splitting the liver themselves to be sure it’s done right. Fishbein is used to middle-of-the-night trips to far-away hospitals to retrieve one piece. This time, the organ was flown on ice to Georgetown, for Fishbein and Matsumoto to divide. The left lobe — just under 20 percent — went to Allison, the rest to Catherwood in an adjoining operating room.

Surgeons carefully calculate the minimum amount of healthy liver a patient needs in the month it will take to regenerate. Indeed, the slight risk associated with split-liver transplants is usually due to not getting a big enough piece, problems with how the organ was divided, or delays in transplanting, explained Philadelphia’s Mazariegos.

A liver also can be sliced into 60-40 sections for two adults, as is done with living donors. But split-liver transplants between two adults are controversial. It’s harder to calculate the right volume fast enough, before the organ deteriorates.

For Catherwood and Allison, the transplant seems to be working, although they have the same risk of long-term organ rejection as any transplant recipient. Catherwood was recuperating at home, well enough even before she was discharged to indulge in chocolate. Allison remained in the hospital for observation, but her liver was clearing away the jaundice.

“It’s so exciting to see what her eyes look like,” her father said. “We got so lucky.”

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.