Daily Archives: February 18, 2008

Baby Held In Locked Room At Airport Dies

Posted on February 18, 2008 by | Leave a comment

Baby held in locked room at airport

A 14-day-old infant traveling here for heart surgery died at Honolulu International Airport on Friday after he, his mother and a nurse were detained by immigration officials in a locked room, a lawyer for the boy’s family said.

The Honolulu medical examiner’s office yesterday identified the infant as Michael Futi of Tafuna, American Samoa’s largest village, which is located on the east coast of Tutuila Island. Autopsy findings have been deferred.

According to police, the child died at 5:50 a.m. It is unknown why immigration officials detained the mother, the nurse and the child.

Scott Ishikawa, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation, said the child went into respiratory failure while in the customs office, which is located near the baggage claims area of the overseas terminal. Airport paramedics were called about 6:10 a.m., he said.

The group arrived on a Hawaiian Airlines flight that landed at 5:30 a.m.

“We were later told the baby was coming here for heart surgery,” Ishikawa said.

Attorney Rick Fried said the child had come to Hawai’i from American Samoa for heart surgery.

The boy’s family plans to file a wrongful death lawsuit, Fried said.

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Posted in Children's Health, Health & Fitness, Politics and Medicine, Society, Survival

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10 Myths About Canadian Healthcare Busted!

Posted on February 18, 2008 by | 2 Comments

2008 is shaping up to be the election year that we finally get to have the Great American Healthcare Debate again. Harry and Louise are back with a vengeance. Conservatives are rumbling around the talk show circuit bellowing about the socialist threat to the (literal) American body politic. And, as usual, Canada is once again getting dragged into the fracas, shoved around by both sides as either an exemplar or a warning — and, along the way, getting coated with the obfuscating dust of so many willful misconceptions that the actual facts about How Canada Does It are completely lost in the melee.

I’m both a health-care-card-carrying Canadian resident and an uninsured American citizen who regularly sees doctors on both sides of the border. As such, I’m in a unique position to address the pros and cons of both systems first-hand. If we’re going to have this conversation, it would be great if we could start out (for once) with actual facts, instead of ideological posturing, wishful thinking, hearsay, and random guessing about how things get done up here.

To that end, here’s the first of a two-part series aimed at busting the common myths Americans routinely tell each other about Canadian health care. When the right-wing hysterics drag out these hoary old bogeymen, this time, we need to be armed and ready to blast them into straw. Because, mostly, straw is all they’re made of.

1. Canada’s health care system is “socialized medicine.”
False. In socialized medical systems, the doctors work directly for the state. In Canada (and many other countries with universal care), doctors run their own private practices, just like they do in the US. The only difference is that every doctor deals with one insurer, instead of 150. And that insurer is the provincial government, which is accountable to the legislature and the voters if the quality of coverage is allowed to slide.

The proper term for this is “single-payer insurance.” In talking to Americans about it, the better phrase is “Medicare for all.”…Read All 10 Myths Here

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Posted in Medicine, Wellness

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Teenage Rebellion A Medical Disease?

Posted on February 18, 2008 by | Leave a comment

For a generation now, disruptive young Americans who rebel against authority figures have been increasingly diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric (psychotropic) drugs.

Disruptive young people who are medicated with Ritalin, Adderall and other amphetamines routinely report that these drugs make them “care less” about their boredom, resentments and other negative emotions, thus making them more compliant and manageable. And so-called atypical antipsychotics such as Risperdal and Zyprexa — powerful tranquilizing drugs — are increasingly prescribed to disruptive young Americans, even though in most cases they are not displaying any psychotic symptoms.

Many talk show hosts think I’m kidding when I mention oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). After I assure them that ODD is in fact an official mental illness — an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers — they often guess that ODD is simply a new term for juvenile delinquency. But that is not the case.

Young people diagnosed with ODD, by definition, are doing nothing illegal (illegal behaviors are a symptom of another mental illness called conduct disorder). In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) created oppositional defiant disorder, defining it as “a pattern of negativistic, hostile and defiant behavior.” The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules” and “often argues with adults.” While ODD-diagnosed young people are obnoxious with adults they don’t respect, these kids can be a delight with adults they do respect; yet many of them are medicated with psychotropic drugs….read rest of story

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Posted in Health & Fitness

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All EU Children To Be Fingerprinted- Big Brother Is Watching-

Posted on February 18, 2008 by | Leave a comment

By 2019 all travellers, including children, will be required to enter a closed booth on their own, where their biometric details, stored digitally on microchips in passports, will be checked against their real fingerprints.

Tony Bunyan, of the Statewatch civil liberties group, believes that the next stage of pan-European moves to tighten frontier controls is “a bridge too far”.”The idea that visitors and possibly EU citizens – including children aged six and above – should enter an enclosed box and be told what to do by machines and for computers to decide whether to let us out or not is a quite appalling proposal,” he said.

The new EU border security proposals herald a culture shock for many and represent a significant advance in the surveillance society.

Currently British passports contain a digital record of an individual’s facial characteristics, which are checked by border guards…. read whole article

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Posted in Children's Health, Health & Fitness, Politics and Medicine, Wellness

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Obese People Have Vitamin Deficiency

Posted on February 18, 2008 by | 3 Comments

 This article reminded me of a recent study I read where it was found that Obese people are frequently vitamin deficient. This is contrary to what we believe. We assume that they are over nourished and therefore obese where the exact opposite it true-

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Vitamin Deficiency May Cause Modern Ills

The Independent – London

02-18-08

chronic shortage of vitamins and other “micronutrients” in the diet may be responsible for triggering many of the ills of modern life such as cancer, obesity and the degenerative diseases of ageing.

Professor Bruce Ames, of the University of California, Berkeley, who invented one of the standard tests for cancer-causing chemicals, said many people’s diets were deficient in one or more of the 40 micronutrients essential for a healthy life.

Taking dietary supplements in the form of vitamin pills could help to counteract many of the disorders associated with ageing, Dr Ames told the American Association meeting.

He said many people on a high-calorie diet in the West or poor diet in developing countries were short of micronutrients and this caused the body to go into an emergency “triage” response in which it tried to keep its metabolism in balance by a process of compensation. This ensures immediate survival, but the consequences are an increase in DNA damage, which causes future cancers, a lowered immune defence, and a decay of the mitochondrial “power plants” of the cells, which causes accelerated ageing,” he said.

He said a shortage of minerals, vitamins and other nutrients could also be partly responsible for obesity.

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Posted in Diet and Nutrition, Diseases, Home, Obese, Wellness