Democrats released second television highlighting
Democrats released a 60-second television ad highlighting Republican vows to repeal the healthcare reform bill, which promises to be a flashpoint in the November election battle for control of Congress.
Republicans want to take it all away, the ads narrator warns of the overhaul, passed by Democrats in March over unified Republican opposition. Tell Republicans we cant afford to go back.
Polls show public opinion remains mixed on the law, which was approved after a divisive year-long fight in Congress. While majorities of Americans still oppose it, some polls show attitudes have improved and most say they do not favor the quick repeal pushed by Republicans.
Republicans, pushing to reclaim control of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, hope to use the law as a political weapon against Democratic supporters in conservative states where the law and Obama are unpopular.
Worried Democrats are still trying to sell it months after the vote, Republican National Committee spokeswoman Katie Wright said. No media blitz will change the fact that Democrats ignored their constituents and voted for a bill that grows the deficit and endangers Medicare.
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the measure would slightly reduce the budget deficit over 10 years. Once fully implemented in 2014, the law is expected to expand insurance coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans and prohibit certain insurance practices, such as denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions.
Under the law, the first wave of one-time, tax-free rebate checks were mailed to tens of thousands of the nearly 4 million seniors affected by an existing gap in coverage under the government-run Medicare prescription drug plan, popularly described as the doughnut hole.
These checks are a real victory for Americas seniors and we will continue working to implement all the provisions in health care reform, said Democratic Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.
The Democratic ad and a series of Democratic events around the country also highlighted other features of the law that kick in early, including tax credits for small businesses to buy insurance and bans on denying coverage to the sick.
Democrats have argued that as more provisions take effect and more benefits are felt by the public, the law will become more popular and Republican calls to repeal it will backfire.
The costs to Republicans may be high because what they are proposing to do will roll back benefitslike helping seniors afford prescription drugs — that Americans desperately need, Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse said.
Editing by Paul Simao source
Researchers from madrid studied just over 100 patients
The study is the second in a week to find new potential uses for allopurinol. Research published on Tuesday found it may be useful as a cheaper alternative to more modern heart drugs from Switzerlands Roche and Frances Servier for patients with chronic chest pain.
Allopurinol is used primarily to treat people with excess uric acid in their blooda condition known as hyperuricemia.
Hyperuricemia can lead to gout and, in extreme cases, to kidney failure. High uric acid levels can also increase the risk of developing high blood pressure and heart disease.
Patients with chronic kidney disease CKDwho most often die from heart disease — often experience hyperuricemia, but this was the first study to assess whether allopurinal would be effective for these patients.
Around 26 million Americans have CKD and the UKs Association of Public Health Observatories estimates that 8.8 percent of the British population also suffers from it.
There is no specific treatment but patients often take medicines to control the factors that may be causing it, such as high blood pressure or diabetes.
Marian Goicoechea and a team of scientists from the Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Maranon in Madrid conducted a trial involving 113 chronic kidney disease patients who either received allopurinol or continued taking their usual drugs.
The researchers analysed kidney disease progression, cardiovascular problems such as heart attacks, and hospitalizations among patients in the study over two years.
In patients taking allopurinol they found that kidney function improved and blood levels of uric acid and C-reactive proteina sign of inflammation — fell significantly.
Allopurinol treatment also reduced the risk of heart problems by 71 percent compared with just taking the usual medicines, and cut the risk of hospitalizations by 62 percent.
The findings were published in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology CJASN.
The researchers said although that allopurinol showed significant potential benefits for CKD patients, these results have to be confirmed in larger prospective trials and are the basis for a hypothesis that still needs to be tested.
Editing by Greg Mahlich source
Eisais eribulin added average two and half months lives
The results of the Phase III trial, presented to a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, have been anticipated after Eisai was given priority review June 1 for U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of the drug.
This is potentially practice changing, ASCO president Dr. Douglas Blayney said in a telephone interview.
Dr. Christopher Twelves of St. James Hospital in Leeds in Britain and an international team studied 762 breast cancer patients with different types of tumor.
All had cancer that had spread and been through at least two rounds of chemotherapy. Two-thirds got two doses of eribulin while getting standard treatment, usually with one other chemotherapy drug but occasionally with just supportive care to treat pain and other symptoms.
The other third got either a third round of chemotherapy or supportive care. Once this treatment fails, the patient often died, Blayney said.
The patients given eribulin did considerably better, the researchers told the meeting. The eribulin patients lived a median of 13 months, compared to just under 11 months for patients who did not get eribulin.
LONGER LIVES
Most cancer trials look for what is called progression-free survival, meaning the doctors are looking to see if the tumors start growing back, or sometimes just response rate, to see if the tumors shrink at all.
This one looked to see how long the patients actually lived.
This study is the first to compare overall survival with this new chemotherapeutic agent to real-life choices in heavily pretreated patients with metastatic breast cancer, Twelves and colleagues said in their written presentation.
The drug works on the same principle, but with a slightly different mechanism, as older cancer drugs called taxanes and is infused intravenously.
Other experts said eribulin could be one of the last new chemotherapy drugs, which typically target fast-growing cells that include tumors but also healthy cells.
This is the era of targeted therapy. Its not an era of chemotherapy, said Dr. Eric Winer of Harvards Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who was not involved in the study.
I dont know that there are going to be many more chemotherapy agents approved for women with breast cancer. That said, this may be one of the last, and potentially provide women with an additional option and maybe an option to be used in combination with targeted therapies in the future.
Three other studies presented to the meeting showed eribulin was effective and tolerated in a different group of patients with breast cancer, as well as colon cancer and urinary cancer patients.
Eisai has filed in Japan, the United States and Europe for approval of eribulin. The company hopes it will become a blockbuster, with global earnings of 1 billion a year.
I think there is a reasonable chance that this drug will actually get approved, Winer said. There arent many drugs that show a survival advantage in this setting.
Additional reporting by Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago Editing by Bill Trott source
New research suggests only patients with very low daily
New research suggests that only patients with very low daily intake of certain omega-3 fatty acids, found in fish and some plants and nuts, are likely to reduce their risk of heart attacks or death if they take more supplements rich in these fatty acids.
The study supports research which has shown that, after a certain point, omega-3 supplements may not do much for the heart. It also comes as a new U.S. Government Accountability Office urged more authority for the Food and Drug Administration to inspect the quality and safety of supplements, whose manufacturers often make claims not supported by data.
Based on data from this and previous studies also in other countries, we think that it is relevant to say that most cardiac patients who are well medically treated and eat at least a certain amount of fish per week, probably will not benefit from taking omega-3 supplements, Mari Manger, the studys lead author and a PhD candidate at University of Bergen in Norway, told Reuters Health by e-mail.
The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, followed more than 2,400 Norwegians, about 80 percent of them men, being treated for heart disease. All were on cholesterol-lowering drugs.
At the beginning of the study, all patients filled out a questionnaire about their eating habits, including the fish products and supplements such as cod liver oil that they had eaten over the past year. From this, the authors calculated how much of three different kinds of omega-3 fatty acids thought to be associated with heart health the subjects were getting in their diets and supplements.
The authors then tracked the patients for an average of almost 5 years for heart-related complications, including heart attacks and death. Except for patients who consumed the lowest levels of omega-3s, there was no relationship between how much a person consumed and whether they suffered a heart attack or other complication.
Only two percent of patients in the study consumed levels of two kinds of omega-3s below the recommended level.
Eating more fish and taking more supplements didnt prevent heart problems, although high levels of omega-3s didnt hurt the patients either.
These results may be atypical, said Dr. Alice Lichtenstein, a nutritional scientist at Tufts University, because the Norwegian diet differs from that of, say, Americans, who rarely consume fish oil. This study doesnt refute current recommendations for individuals to consume more fish, Lichtenstein, who was not involved with the study, told Reuters Health.
The current data indicates that theres probably a threshold of benefits for omega-3s, and thats why the recommendation from the American Heart Association is two fish meals a week.
Source here American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, May 19, 2010. source
Earlier experiments have shown cows diet fresh grass
Studies in animals have suggested that CLAs can protect the heart, and help in weight loss.
Hannia Campos of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and her colleagues found, in a study of 4,000 people, that people with the highest concentrations of CLAsthe top fifth among all participants — had a 36 percent lower risk of heart attack compared to those with the lowest concentrations.
Those findings held true even once the researchers took into account heart disease risk factors such as high blood pressure and smoking.
The new findings suggest that CLA offers heart-healthy benefits that could more than offset the harms of saturated fat in milk, Campos said.
Because pasture grazing leads to higher CLA in milk, and it is the natural feed for cattle, it seems like more emphasis should be given to this type of feeding, she told Reuters Health by email.
Dairy products in the U.S. come almost exclusively from feedlots, she added. And cows milk is the primary source of CLA. Beef contains a small amount.
Campos and her colleagues looked to Costa Rica for their study, where pasture grazing of dairy cows is still the norm. They identified nearly 2,000 Costa Ricans who had suffered a non-fatal heart attack, and another 2,000 who had not. Then they measured the amount of CLA in fat tissues to estimate each persons intake.
Since CLA typically travels with a host of other fats, the researchers went a step further to tease apart its effects from those of its predominantly unhealthful companions, they report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The difference in risk attributed to CLA subsequently rose to 49 percent.
Whole-fat milk and dairy products have gotten such a bad reputation in recent years due to their saturated fat and cholesterol contents, and now we find that CLA may be incredibly health-promoting, Michelle McGuire, spokesperson for the journals publisher, the American Society for Nutrition, and associate professor at Washington State University, told Reuters Health in an email. Whole milk is not the villain
Each year, approximately 1.5 million Americans will suffer a heart attack. A third will not survive.
The evidence may now be piling up another paper out of Sweden in the same issue of the journal as the Costa Rican study also hints at heart attack protection through milk fat.
Further, the benefits of CLA may extend beyond the heart to the prevention of cancer and diabetes, suggests McGuire, pointing to results of other animal studies. Milk is actually the only food ever designed by nature to be fed to mammals, she added. We need to look to milk as the perfect food and learn everything we can from it.
SOURCE here American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, online May 12, 2010. source
They said people who use any type tanning bed for any time
5 to 3 times more likely to develop the skin cancer than people who never use them.
The study confirms prior research linking indoor tanning beds with melanoma, and answers any lingering questions about whether the practice is safe, or if the risk depends on the type of tanning bed used.
We found that it didnt matter the type of tanning device used there was no safe tanning device, said DeAnn Lazovich of the University of Minnesota, whose study appeared in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.
Studies had suggested younger people were at greater risk, but Lazovich said the risk rises with frequency of use, regardless of age, gender or the device used.
The increased risks we have reported are the risks associated with indoor tanning above and beyond any other known risk factors for melanoma, Lazovich said in a telephone briefing.
STRONGER REGULATION
Dr. Allan Halpern, chief of dermatology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, told the briefing that melanoma cases are on the rise in the United States and the findings strengthen the case for regulating tanning beds.
He said the World Health Organization already classifies tanning beds as a human carcinogen, but in the United States, tanning beds are considered a class 1 medical devicewhich is the equivalent of tongue depressors, he said.
The FDA has been reconsidering this classification and on Wednesday the agency released a video saying the use of any ultraviolet or UV-emitting device for the purpose of tanning should be avoided.
Im hopeful it will be very helpful in the hands of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to move forward to regulate this industry, said Halpern, who was not involved in the research.
For the study, Lazovich and colleagues studied 1,167 people diagnosed with melanoma and compared them with 1,101 people who did not have melanoma.
The team asked people which type of tanning bed they had usedthose that emit UVA radiation or UVB radiation.
They found that melanoma risk was about 3 times greater among people who had used tanning beds that emit UVB rays and 4.4 times greater for UVA-emitting devices.
They also found that risk increased with use.
They defined frequent use as people who used indoor tanning for more than 50 hours, or more than 100 sessions, or for more than 10 years.
Most reports were not able to adjust for sun exposure, confirm a dose-response, or examine specific tanning devices, Lazovich said. Our population-based, case-control study was conducted to address these limitations.
Melanoma accounts for about 3 percent of skin cancer cases but causes most skin cancer deaths, and doctors have few effective treatments to offer once the disease has spread.
According to the American Cancer Society, 68,000 people were diagnosed with melanoma in 2009, and 8,650 died of it.
Editing by Sandra Maler source
In a small study of 112 children with juvenile diabetes
Enteroviruses are viruses that can thrive in the gastrointestinal tract.
They are very commonsecond only to common cold viruses — and most people who are infected with an enterovirus have no obvious illness. Others have flu-like symptoms, aching muscles or a rash and some severe viruses attack the nervous system.
Toniolo stressed that the results did not show a causal link between enteroviruses and diabetes, but said the discovery was in tune with previous studies which have suggested enterovirus infections may be associated with diabetes.
Infection by different enteroviruses may be linked to the early stages of diabetes, he said.
Juvenile diabetes, also called Type 1 or insulin-dependent diabetes, is an autoimmune disease in which the body destroys its own ability to make insulin. It affects around 22 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.
The disease develops in people who are genetically susceptible to it and scientists think exposure to some as yet unknown trigger or triggers may be what sets it off.
Toniolo and colleagues tested the blood of 112 children aged between 2 and 16 years at the time they were diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes to see if it contained enteroviral DNA.
The scientists compared their blood with that of children without diabetes. They found low-level enteroviral infectivity in 83 percent of the diabetes patients, compared with 7 percent of children with no diabetes.
These data do not provide a causal relationship between enterovirus infections and diabetes, Toniolo said in a statement with the study, which was presented at a conference of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego, California.
However, the high prevalence of enteroviral genome sequences in newly diagnosed type-1 diabetes cases indicate that different enterovirus types represent a significant biomarker of early stage juvenile diabetes, Toniolo added.
Sufferers of Type 1 diabetes become unable to properly break down sugar. If the disease is untreated, blood vessels and nerves are destroyed, organs fail and patients die.
Toniolo said if similar results were found in studies of patients in other geographic areas, it would suggest that detecting enteroviruses early may help researchers find other environmental factors that lead to type-1 diabetes. This in turn could lead to new ways of preventing or treating the disease.
Editing by Michael Taylor source
Fda may disclose more details on drug, food safety
The effort is part of a broader plan to remake the public image of the Food and Drug Administration, which has come under fire for being too secretive.
An agency taskforce is suggesting 21 ways the FDA could release more information to the public in areas like drug evaluation and in food manufacturing inspections, another area in which it has oversight responsibility.
Agency leaders stressed that the FDA is merely considering the changes and that some would require legal changes by Congress to implement.
The FDA has long operated under strict confidentiality rules because its scientists handle reams of proprietary information from food, drug and device companies.
However, that operating style has come under fire in recent years from critics who have charged that the agency is too slow to disclose drug safety issues.
The changes suggested in the 67-page report would mark an about-face from current policies that allow manufacturers to control most public information about products in development.
Deputy Commissioner Dr. Joshua Sharfstein said greater transparency would benefit both consumers and companies, who will be able to learn from the success and failures of competitors.
The more people see how the agency approaches this the more theyll understand the kind of data they need and the more rapid and efficient approvals could be, Sharfstein said during a call with reporters.
Problems with FDA transparency were highlighted in 2004 when the popular painkiller Vioxx was pulled from the market five years after its approval, because of links to heart attack and stroke. Critics said lives could have been saved if the agency had opened up more to outside researchers and health advocates.
Half of the new suggestions are designed to give more information about experimental drugs and devices under review at the agency. Under current FDA regulations, communication about such products is extremely limited. In the initial months of review FDA spokespersons will not even confirm the existence of a new drug application. Additionally, when the FDA declines to approve a treatment, it allows the manufacturer to make the announcement – usually in the most vague terms possible.
Under the proposals posted online, the FDA would begin publishing rejection letters to drug and device manufacturers, including any safety concerns that led to the decision.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association said Wednesday it is reviewing FDAs proposal and generally supports increased transparency.
But the groups senior vice president, Ken Johnson, added that FDA must ensure that the competitive development process remains intact to serve patients and the public.
The medical device industrys lobbying group AdvaMed took a more critical stance, suggesting some of FDAs proposals could needlessly disclose proprietary company information.
Weakening intellectual property protections is a dangerous recipe for stifling investment in breakthrough products and could significantly impede medical progress and ultimately impede public health, the group said in a statement.
Other recommendations from the FDA task force include
– publishing inspection reports of drug and food manufacturing plants online
– publicizing criminal cases against companies regulated by the FDA
– putting more documents online to relieve a massive backlog of document requests
One of the agencys toughest critics questioned that last strategy, pointing out that the FDA would actually need more time and money to redact thousands of documents to be posted online.
There are some important steps forward here, but you can talk about transparency from here to eternity and if you dont have an actual mechanism to make that data available it becomes less meaningful, said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. source
the pill turns 50: debate continues over cultural significance women have new options
They might be surprised to learn that U.S. officials announcing approval of the worlds first oral contraceptive were uncomfortable.
Our own ideas of morality had nothing to do with the case, said John Harvey of the Food and Drug Administration in 1960.
The pill was safe, in other words. Dont blame us if you think its wicked.
Sunday, Mothers Day, is the 50th anniversary of that provocative announcement that introduced to the world what is now widely acknowledged as one of the most important inventions of the last century.
The world has changed, but its debatable what part the birth control pill played. Some experts think it gets too much credit or blame for the sexual revolution. After all, sex outside of marriage wasnt new in 1960.
The pill definitely changed sex though, giving women more control over their fertility than theyd ever had before and permanently putting doctors – who previously didnt see contraceptives as part of their job – in the birth control picture.
But some things havent changed. Now as then, a male birth control pill is still on the drawing board.
Theres a joke in this field that a male pill is always five to seven years away from the market, and thats what people have been saying since 1960, said Andrea Tone, a history professor at Montreals McGill University and author of Devices and Desires A History of Contraception in America.
The pill is Americas favorite form of reversible birth control. Sterilization is the leader overall. Nearly a third of women who want to prevent unwanted pregnancies use it. In 2008, Americans spent more than 3.5 billion on birth control pills, Tone said, and weve gone from the one pill to 40 different brands.
There are Yaz, Yasmin, Seasonale, Seasonique and Lybrel – all with slightly different packaging, formulations and selling points. Lybrel is the first pill designed to eliminate menstrual periods entirely, although gynecologists say any generic can do the same thing if you skip the placebo and take the active pill every day.
In the 1960s, anthropologist Ashley Montagu thought the birth control pill was as important as the discovery of fire. Turns out it wasnt the answer to overpopulation, war and poverty, as some of its early advocates had hoped. Nor did it universally save marriages.
Married couples could have happier sex with more freedom and less fear. The divorce rate might go down and there would be no more unwanted pregnancies, said Elaine Tyler May, 62, a University of Minnesota history professor who wrote America and the Pill.
None of those things happened, not the optimistic hopes or the pessimistic fears of sexual anarchy, she said.
And it didnt eliminate all unwanted pregnancies either. Nearly half of all pregnancies to U.S. women are unintended and nearly half of those end in abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which has gathered data on abortions for years.
The pill is often associated with the womens movement of the 1970s. But the two feminists behind the pill, the ones who provided the intellectual spark and the financial backing, were born a century earlier, in the 1870s.
As suffragists worked for the vote, renowned birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger distributed pamphlets with contraceptive advice and dreamed of a magic pill to prevent pregnancy.
Her grandson, Alex Sanger, 62, now chair of the International Planned Parenthood Council, remembers playing catch as a boy with his famous grandmother and eating her firehouse-spicy food.
My grandmother had the idea for the pill back in 1912 when she was working on the lower East Side of New York, Alex Sanger said. She saw women resorting to back alley, illegal abortions. One too many of these women died in her arms and she said Enough.
Katharine McCormick, a philanthropist with a science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, bankrolled the work of Gregory Pincus, the man Sanger convinced to develop the pill. It was my grandmothers idea and Katharine McCormicks money, Alex Sanger said.
Ironically, when health hazards of the early pill arose – high levels of hormones caused blood clots in some women – young feminists protested that men had invented it and turned women into unwitting guinea pigs.
The FDAs response to the hazards of the pill led to greater access to safety information for patients, another less-appreciated part of the pills legacy.
Todays pill, with much lower doses of hormones, is much safer than the pill of 50 years ago. And it may even be good for you.
The health benefits are tremendous, said Dr. Melissa Gilliam, chief of family planning contraceptive research at the University of Chicago Medical Center. It decreases the risk of ovarian cancer and uterine cancer. If we called it the cancer-preventing pill, it would have far better traction. Its a real success story.
The pill divided mothers and daughters in its early days. Married women had clamored for it as soon as it went on the market – within two years of its approval, more than a million women were taking it. But that didnt mean they wanted their unmarried daughters to have it.
I talk to my daughter about the pill a lot more than I talked to my mother about the pill, said Jean Elson, 61, a sociologist and expert on womens health at the University of New Hampshire. Elson secretly started taking the pill in college in the late 1960s before she was married. Her mother wouldnt have approved.
The only conversations about sex I remember with my mother were not to. I remember warnings about tongue kissing. She didnt do that until she was engaged, Elson said.
Many parents now discuss birth control with their unmarried daughters and sons. They also may discuss condoms to prevent disease, including AIDS. The greatest fear associated with unprotected sex for young people is no longer pregnancy, its serious sexually transmitted disease.
Another change is advertising. Women now in their 20s have seen ads for the pill nearly their entire lives. The first magazine ads for the pill ran in 1992. Now TV ads show smiling women liberated by the ability to limit or even eliminate their menstrual periods.
The message is your period shouldnt get in the way. Its an appealing message, said Sarah Forbes, 28, curator of the Museum of Sex in New York. Her generation takes the pill for many reasons and they take it for granted.
Were so used to it being so freely available, Forbes said. Its almost impossible to think of a world where we didnt have access to it.
The pill is so ubiquitous that young women may have trouble learning about other options. Tone said one doctor said he didnt remember how to fit a diaphragm, a flexible shield that covers the cervix. The pill is so highly marketed that other methods, like implants and IUDs, arent clearly understood by young women.
Weve got choices, but the information about them isnt always well balanced, said Judy Norsigian, 62, executive director of Our Bodies Ourselves, the nonprofit organization that publishes the long-standing womens health guide of the same name.
Female doctors use IUDs twice as frequently as the general population of women and many recommend it to their patients.
The future of birth control is not pills at all, said Dr. Lisa Perriera, 34, of Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in Cleveland.
The best birth control is easy to use, highly effective at preventing pregnancy and has few side effects, Perriera said. The methods that fit those criteria best are IUDs and implants. I think thats where birth control is going.
Others hold out hope for a breakthrough in male-centered birth control. An oral drug called miglustat worked in mice, but not in men. Researchers are recruiting men for studies of a hormonal gel to suppress sperm production.
The question is will a single company decide to take this to market, to get FDA clearance, a very expensive undertaking, when its hard to predict how commercially viable a male pill would be, Tone said. As much as women would like men to be equal partners in preventing pregnancy, women at the same time feel a little bit nervous entrusting men to take a pill or be on a patch.
After all these years, a male equivalent to the birth control pill is still five to seven years away.
On the Net
FDA guide to birth control
http//bit.ly/bY3XZ3
Our Bodies Ourselves
http//www.ourbodiesourselves.org
Population Council source
Officials monitoring air, water, seafood to guard against health problems from gulf oil leak
The list of potential threats runs from minor nuisances such as runny noses and headaches to nausea. While waiting to see how bad things will get, public health agencies are monitoring air quality, drinking water supplies and seafood processing plants and advising people to take precautions.
We dont know how long this spill will last or how much oil well be dealing with, so theres a lot of unknowns, said Dr. Jimmy Guidry, Louisianas state health director. But were going to make things as safe as humanly possible.
Oil has been spewing into the Gulf at a rate of at least 200,000 gallons a day since an offshore drilling rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 people. Little if any has reached land thus far, but shifts in wind speed and direction could propel the slick toward populated areas.
In a possible hint of things to come, a foul stench drifted over parts of southwestern Louisiana last week. The oil probably was the culprit, said Alan Levine, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, whose office heard about dozens of complaints – even from state legislators in New Orleans, some 130 miles from the leaky undersea well.
Their eyes were burning, they felt nauseated, they were smelling it, Levine said.
Farther up the coast at Shell Beach, marina operator and commercial fisherman Robert Campo said the smell gave him a headache as he collected oysters 20 miles offshore. It was rotten, he said.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has began round-the-clock air monitoring in Gulf coastal areas and posting online hourly readings for ozone and tiny particles such as soot. Both can cause respiratory problems and are particuarly aggravating for people with chronic conditions such as asthma.
Crude oil emits volatile organic compounds that react with nitrogen oxides to produce ozone. Fires being set by the Coast Guard to burn off oil on the waters surface would produce sooty, acrid smoke.
We dont know what the impacts are going to be yet, said Dave Bary, an EPA spokesman in Dallas. We dont know in what direction this oil will go.
The potential for unhealthy air quality depends on a variety of factors, particularly the speed and direction of winds that could disperse fumes and determine where they go, said Jonathan Ward, an environmental toxicology professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
With the leaky Gulf well some 50 miles offshore, Ward said much of the oil vapor likely wouldnt reach land, although the potential for air pollution from the slick will remain as long as the leak continues.
Public health agencies in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi advised people near the coast who experience nausea, headaches or other smell-related ailments to stay inside, turn on air conditioners and avoid exerting themselves outdoors.
In addition to air pollution, officials also were guarding against health problems from tainted drinking water and seafood.
Some communities, including New Orleans, get their supplies from the Mississippi River. Its southerly currents will prevent oil from drifting upstream to city intake pipes, and the Coast Guard is making sure that any ships with oil-coated hulls are scrubbed down before proceeding up the river, Guidry said.
Even so, the state health department has ordered testing of municipal water systems near the Gulf for signs of oil.
Its next to impossible that a high amount would get in, Guidry said. Even if some got through, more than likely the treatment system would eliminate it.
The department this week began taking samples at seafood processing plants. Officials have ordered a temporary moratorium on fishing in federal waters from the Mississippi River to the Florida Panhandle, but sampling will provide benchmarks enabling scientists to track any increases in contaminant levels once fishing is allowed to resume.
Louisiana health officials said they believe fish, shrimp and other Gulf delicacies already on the market are safe.
If we see increases in hydrocarbons or other contaminants, wed stop the flow of seafood, Levine said.
Oil has compounds that have been linked to cancer. But they break down in the body and are excreted, so theres little chance of getting cancer from tainted seafood even if people ate it for many years, said LuAnn White, director of Tulane Universistys Center for Applied Environmental Public Health.
The telltale smell likely would deter consumers from eating oily seafood, White said, but if people did eat it, they might get gastrointestinal sickness.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working with epidemiologists in the Gulf states to develop studies of health repercussions from the oil spill, Guidry said.
Yet another hazard is direct contact with oil-saturated water – particularly for cleanup crews and volunteers involved in animal rescue operations.
When the container ship Cosco Busan hit a bridge and released 53,000 gallons of highly toxic bunker fuel into San Francisco Bay in November 2007, officials managing the cleanup ordered volunteers to wear protective suits, gloves and masks that later were discarded at a hazardous waste dump. Some oil fouled beaches, which were closed to prevent danger to the public.
People working around the Gulf spill should be equipped with respirator devices and wear heavy-duty gloves and protective clothing to guard against painful skin rashes, said Gina Solomon, an associate professor at the University of California-San Francisco medical school and a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council who has treated patients exposed to oil fumes.
The workers absolutely need to be protected, Solomon said. source