Negative Blogs

Health experts warned Wednesday of a stroke crisis in Europe which is already costing the region’s economy an estimated 38 billion euros ($56 billion) a year, with numbers expected to rise as populations age.

In a report for the European Parliament, medical experts working with the campaign group Action for Stroke Prevention, said atrial fibrillation (AF), the most common form of abnormal heart rhythm, affects more than six million people in Europe and increases the risk of stroke by five times.

The economic and health impact of stroke is predicted to grow as the number of people with AF is expected to rise two and a half times by 2050 due to aging populations, the report said.

It the said economic burden created by patients suffering strokes accounts for 2 to 3 percent of total healthcare spending in the European Union and AF is responsible for 15 to 20 percent of all strokes caused by blood clots.

“This burden will increase in years to come, due to both the improved survival of patients with conditions such as heart attacks and Europe’s aging population,” the report said.

Gregory Lip, professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Birmingham, said the majority of such strokes were preventable, but under-diagnosis and poor care of AF patients, as well as under-use of medicines and the side-effects of drugs means stroke creates “an unnecessary and heavy burden” on patients, carers and health systems.

AF causes the two upper chambers of the heart to quiver instead of beating properly, resulting in blood pooling and potentially forming clots that can cause stroke. Patients can be given anticoagulants, or blood thinners, to help prevent clots.

Stroke is the most common cardiovascular problem after heart disease and kills an estimated 5.7 million people worldwide each year. Current trends suggest the number of strokes in the European Union will rise from 1.1 million a year in 2000 to 1.5 million a year by 2025, the report said.

Action for Stroke Prevention, an alliance of cardiologists, neurologists, family doctors and patient groups, urged EU policymakers to improve stroke risk assessment and diagnosis of atrial fibrillation before the increasing frequency of strokes becomes “a major public health crisis.” Hard money training.

Americans are turning away from the world, showing a tendency toward isolationism in foreign affairs that has risen to the highest level in four decades, a poll out Thursday found.

Almost half, 49 percent, told the polling organization that the United States should “mind its own business” internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own, the Pew Research Center survey found. That’s up from 30 percent who said that in December 2002.

Results of the survey appear to conflict with President Barack Obama’s activist foreign policy, including a newly announced buildup of 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan to fight Taliban and al-Qaida extremists.

“Isolationist Sentiment Surges to Four-Decade High,” the nonpartisan research center headlined its report on the poll about America’s role in the world.

Only 32 percent of the poll respondents favored increasing U.S. troops in Afghanistan, while 40 percent favored decreasing them. And fewer than half, or 46 percent, of those polled said it was somewhat or very likely that Afghanistan would be able to withstand the radicals’ threat.

Forty-one percent of those surveyed said the United States plays a less important and powerful role as a world leader than it did a decade ago, up from 25 percent who said that just before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the report said.

Pew Research Center President Andrew Kohut said in an interview that the “very bad economy” appeared most responsible for the growth of isolationist sentiment. He said the public was also “displeased with the two wars we are waging, in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

While isolationism and unilateralism reached four-decade highs among the public, the stature of China increased.

Among Americans polled, 44 percent said China was the world’s leading economic power compared with 27 percent who named the United States. In February 2008, 41 percent said the U.S. was the leading economic power, while 30 percent said China.

A majority of Americans surveyed, or 53 percent, see China’s emerging power as a threat to the United States. Hard money training.

When the nation’s swine flu vaccination program began in early October, health officials predicted it was going to be “messy.” They were right.

The program has been plagued with problems and information gaps:

* Health officials have been terrible at predicting when and how much vaccine would be available. Only about 44 million doses have been shipped so far. Initially, officials said more than three times that would be out by now.
* At times vaccine shipments have been inexplicably lopsided. For example, smaller counties in Illinois and California have received the same amount delivered to counties with seven times as many people.
* Health officials have stressed that people most at risk for swine flu complications should go to the head of the line, but they haven’t tried to make sure that actually happened.
* And despite pledges that they would be transparent about the vaccine program, some health officials have refused to disclose where all the doses are going, and they have held back on public service announcements telling people who should be coming in for shots. Also, many states were slow to establish Web sites that give vaccination locations.

To be fair, health officials say, the government deserves credit for a herculean effort to develop and distribute a safe and effective vaccine against a deadly virus that was first identified only seven months ago.

“You have a brand-new disease that gets identified in April. By October, you have a vaccine for it. By any standards, it’s a miracle,” said Dr. Diane Helentjaris, director of the Virginia Department of Health office handling swine flu response.

But complaints have been mounting, with lawmakers this week holding hearings in Washington and elsewhere, pressing for explanations.

“Calls are still coming in to me about, ‘Why can’t I get the vaccine?’” said Andrea Stillman, a Connecticut state senator speaking at a Wednesday hearing in Hartford. Hard money training

Humans could become extinct, a new study concludes, but no single event, aside from complete destruction of the globe, could do us in, and all extinction scenarios would have to involve some kind of intent, either malicious or not, by people in power.

The determinations suggest that the human race itself will ultimately determine its fate.

“I think the ability to adapt very quickly is singular to humanity,” project leader Tobin Lopes told Discovery News. “Species progress and evolve to enhance their chances, but it’s done over a very long period of time.”

“Instinct guides a lot of what we do early in our lives, but the capacity to learn different behaviors as a result of different environments makes humanity capable of survival,” added Lopes, who is associate director of global energy management programs at the University of Colorado Denver.

For the study, accepted for publication in the journal Futures, Lopes and his team used a standardized approach for scenario planning called “intuitive logics,” which is normally applied to predict business, economic and certain other outcomes.

“The intuitive logics approach, and scenario planning as a practice, starts with the present and works forward to an unknown future,” he explained. Co-authors served as “stakeholders,” just as they would in planning a business, and identified key concerns that may adversely affect them.

The concerns were ranked according to possible impact and uncertainty before being plugged into the model, which also incorporated known outcomes, such as attack response times, prior pandemic death percentages, and detection-to-cure time frames.

The result was three scenarios in which humans could go extinct. Each consists of multiple events, such as pandemic, warfare, global warming-related occurrences and a meteor strike, which occur in relative succession and result in equally destructive domino effects, such as societal breakdowns leading to economic decline and escalated terrorism.

While any number and combination of doom-and-gloom happenings could destroy the human race, the researchers outlined four, more general types of events that may also serve as “signposts,” or events that may signal the unfolding of a defined scenario. In this case, that defined scenario is human extinction.

“The types were non-war human-caused — whether accidental or intended or purposeful, natural-viral, natural-environmental, and finally nuclear or near nuclear war/engagement between any two nations,” Lopes said. Hard money training

There is no such thing as a dull decade. The arc of history is long—to maul a line by Dr. Martin Luther King—and it bends toward stuff happening. Even the 1970s, generally regarded as the ugly stepdecade of the 20th century, played host to a White House scandal that sprawled on for months, metastasizing into the only presidential resignation in American history. Beat that, 1980s. (OK, no sweat: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of the Soviet Union …) Still, there are decades when a few earthquakes shuffle the terrain and jostle the nerves—and then there are decades when the world splits open to the boiling core and remakes itself.

Maybe after a generation or two have passed, the events of the 21st century’s first 10 years will recede in significance. With time, perhaps 9/11 will go back to being just another day in September. It sure seems unlikely from here. Indeed, the 10-year period beginning in 2000 has been marked by a string of colossal events that, in any other decade, would have been the undisputed story of their time. It has been a dazing and bedazzling era, almost biblical in its bookending events: the televised tragedy of 9/11 and the election of America’s first black president—a man whose name meant nothing to anyone outside of politics until just a few years before his ascension to the most powerful office in the world. Just think: Hurricane Katrina—a catastrophe so vast it nearly wiped off the map an entire American city—rates a distant, even debatable, third among this decade’s biggest headlines. The Boston Red Sox, trailed around by the Curse of Babe Ruth since 1919, finally won the World Series—twice!—but they, too, must get in line behind two ongoing wars, a global financial collapse, a cataclysmic tsunami, torture, Bernie Madoff, and on and on.

The one thing this decade hasn’t had, oddly, is a name. We could never seem to agree on one. Is it the Aughties? The Double-Zeroes? The Oh-Ohs? The 2K’s? The Zeds? It shouldn’t matter, except that it’s hard to wrap your arms around something when you don’t even know what to call it. “The ‘50s,” “the ‘60s”—for Americans, the terms conjure a specific, albeit oversimplified, portrait of those eras in America. But perhaps it’s fitting that this decade should remain stubbornly absent a name. It’s been too big, too vast, too cataclysmic, too transformative for just one.

And in any case, a decade is just an empty unit of time, arbitrarily walling off of events that exist both within and beyond them. They are mostly useful as a means to an end: when we get to the close of one decade, we use it as an excuse to indulge in two beloved pastimes, looking backward and making lists. As 2010 draws closer, Newsweek.com will be doing plenty of both. “NEWSWEEK 20/10” will commemorate the end of the decade by unveiling 20 top-10 lists over the next four weeks, each one surveying the past decade from a fresh perspective and featuring guest essays by some of the biggest names of the world, many of whom made the news they’ll be writing about. Additionally, thanks to a first-of-its-kind partnership with Facebook, NEWSWEEK is proud to offer readers the ability to reorder every one of the lists in “Newsweek 20/10.” It’s your chance to play along and tell us what we got wrong.

Along with our package of 20 lists, NEWSWEEK’s leading writers—a group that includes Fareed Zakaria on global affairs, Howard Fineman on U.S. politics, Daniel Gross on the economy, Sharon Begley on science, and Daniel Lyons on technology—will take turns over the coming days sharing “One Big Thought About the Decade.” We’ll also unveil a giant, decade-spanning slideshow, “120 Pictures, 120 Months,” in which our photography editors have chosen one picture to represent every month of the decade. (OK, technically, there are only 118 pictures because we haven’t gotten through the last two months of the decade yet. Once we get far enough into December, we promise to add in the 119th and 120th photographs in our series and complete the journey.) Finally, in the last week of November, we’ll wrap things up with a game of alternative history called “The Gore Decade,” in which a series of writers imagine what the last 10 years would’ve looked like if Al Gore had won the coin-flip election of 2000—essentially, a retrospective of the decade that didn’t happen. Hard money training

It was bound to happen: Some people who aren’t at high risk for swine flu complications got the much-in-demand vaccine.

Sometimes they were healthy adults or senior citizens instead of kids, pregnant women and people with health problems.

Before Los Angeles County health officials stepped up screening at their flu clinics, Natalie Thompson sailed through the long line and got the vaccine along with her 8-year-old son, even though she’s not in one of the priority groups.

“If I can get it, I’m not gonna say no,” said Thompson, 35, of Hollywood Hills.

Another mom, Katy Radparvar, didn’t say no either.

“Our doctor doesn’t have it yet,” said the 41-year-old woman who was vaccinated along with her three children at a public health vaccination site in suburban Encino last week.

Public health officials don’t want to be vaccine police. Many don’t turn anyone away who wants the vaccine, though some locations are tougher than others.

“For many this is a frustrating process and we really sympathize with those who show up at a clinic and can’t get vaccinated,” said Los Angeles County public health director Dr. Jonathan Fielding.

Across the country, thousands have waited in line and many have been turned away, as manufacturers have trickled out the slow-to-produce vaccine. Things are improving, and now about 25 million doses are available, the government says. Hard money training

First it was the rush for hand sanitizer. Then it was the quest for the vaccine. Now, as increasing numbers of children are coming down with swine flu, more parents are facing yet another anxiety-provoking chase: the hunt for liquid Tamiflu for kids.

Spot shortages of the liquid form of the medicine are forcing mothers and fathers to drive from pharmacy to pharmacy, often late into the evening after getting a diagnosis and prescription from a pediatrician, in search of the syrupy concoction recommended for the youngest victims of the global pandemic.

“It was so frustrating,” said Cheryl Copeland of Silver Spring, who finally found some of the elusive medication for her sick 5-year-old son, William, at an independent drug store Monday after being turned away by a CVS and Rite Aid. “There was a moment when the first pharmacist said, ‘We don’t have it. There’s been a run on it,’ When I said to myself, ‘Where on Earth am I going to find it?’ ”

The drug can make the flu milder, go away more quickly and may cut the risk of serious, potentially life-threatening complications. The shortages are being caused by a surge in demand because of the second wave of swine flu sweeping the country, combined with a decision by the Swiss company that makes the medication to focus on producing the drug in capsules. Hard money training

Annual production of H1N1 vaccine will be “substantially less” than the 4.9 billion doses the World Health Organization (WHO) previously forecast was possible, a spokesman said on Friday.

WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said that based on clinical test results from some 25 drugmakers, weekly production was less than 94 million doses, although it seemed one dose would be enough to give immunity against the swine flu strain.

“The real figure will be substantially less than 4.9 billion,” Hartl told reporters.

The WHO previously forecast one third of the world’s nearly seven billion people could be affected by the H1N1 pandemic, but so far the vast majority of victims are suffering only mild symptoms.

Hartl gave no exact new forecast but noted WHO’s previous estimate of 4.9 billion had been based on drugmakers switching all production of seasonal flu vaccine to the new vaccine against the H1N1 strain and getting good yields.

In a statement, the WHO said current supplies of pandemic vaccine are “inadequate for a world population in which virtually everyone is susceptible to infection.”

China has developed a vaccine for swine flu and is set to become the first country in the world to begin mass inoculations, but there are concerns over possible side effects, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said.

WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl told CNN, “We have to be ready for the fact that there might be adverse effects.”

“No matter what vaccine you’re looking at, sometimes there are extremely rare side effects. We don’t even know what those are yet, but they will show up in one in every two or 10 million vaccinated.”

Inoculations could begin in the next few weeks, according to the South China Morning Post, before celebrations begin on October 1 to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic.

The vaccine, PANFLU.1, was developed by Sinovac Biotech Ltd and is suitable for people aged three to 60.

Sinovac says the single-shot vaccine has been approved by China’s National Institute for the Control of Pharmaceutical and Biological Products and has obtained the Certificate for the Release of Biological Products. It says more than five million doses will be ready by the end of September.

There were 100,000 new cases of swine flu in England last week, nearly double the number from the previous seven days, authorities announced Friday.

Children 14 or younger were those predominantly affected, with those older than 65 showing much lower rates, the Department of Health said in its weekly swine flu update.

Most cases continue to be mild, the department said, but a small minority are severe.

The last weekly update showed 55,000 new cases. There is no figure for the week before that, but for the week ended July 3, there were 2,798 new cases. There were 1,442 new cases the week before that, according to department figures.

The Department of Health obtained the data from doctor’s offices that report their consultations for flu-like or other acute respiratory illnesses. It said consultation rates at doctor’s offices had risen sharply in the past week.

There are 840 patients hospitalized with swine flu in England, the department said.