CMPSS.COM - Employment - Working in health care can be risky, study hints

(1) 2 3 4 ... 139 »

Employment : Working in health care can be risky, study hints

Posted by admin on 2008/11/20 5:58:42 (0 reads)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that health care workers are more likely to die from bloodborne infections and related illnesses than people working in other occupations.

"There is evidence that over the past 20 to 25 years health care workers have been more likely to die of these kinds of infections than other workers are," Dr. Sara E. Luckhaupt of the CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in Cincinnati told Reuters Health.

"What we can't say is how much of this is occupational exposure and how much is non-occupational exposure, so it's important to think about both," she added. Past investigations have suggested that most of these infections were not contracted on the job.

Needlesticks and other accidents on the job expose nurses, doctors and other health care workers to infection with HIV (the virus that causes AIDS), hepatitis B, and hepatitis C, Luckhaupt and her NIOSH colleague Dr. Geoffrey M. Calvert note in a report in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine.

The researchers had previously found that male health care workers are at increased risk of HIV and viral hepatitis. They conducted the current study to examine whether death from these infections is also higher among workers in the field.

Luckhaupt and Calvert looked at data from the National Occupational Mortality Surveillance system for 1984 to 2004 on 248,550 deaths from HIV, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and liver cancer and cirrhosis, both of which can be consequences of viral hepatitis.

For men, they found, working in health care more than doubled the likelihood of dying from HIV, while it nearly doubled mortality from hepatitis B. Deaths due to hepatitis C and cirrhosis were also somewhat more likely among men who worked in health care. But for women, only death from hepatitis C was more frequent in health care workers.

Based on occupation, male nurses were at the highest risk of HIV and hepatitis B mortality, while female nurses were actually 31 percent less likely to die of HIV than women working outside the health care industry.

"The greatest limitation to our study was that information was not available on possible confounding factors such as sexual risk behaviors, history of blood transfusions, intravenous drug use, and alcohol use," the researchers write. However, they add, past studies suggest that most bloodborne infections among health care workers are not job-related. Work in the health care industry could be a stand-in for other risk factors, they suggest.

"Research is needed to understand why, despite their probably high degree of knowledge about the transmission of HIV and hepatitis, male health-care workers still engage in these risk behaviors," Luckhaupt and Calvert write. "Targeted interventions to decrease the risk of bloodborne pathogens among health-care workers may need to be gender-specific."

SOURCE: American Journal of Industrial Medicine, November 2008.

Comments?

Child Health : Smoking while pregnant harms baby's blood vessels

Posted by admin on 2008/11/20 5:56:47 (0 reads)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women who smoke during pregnancy may cause permanent blood vessel damage in their children that may become evident as early as young adulthood and raise the risk for heart attack and stroke, Dutch investigators reported today.

The study involved 732 young adults, born between 1970 and 1973, who were evaluated at around 30 years of age. Compared with young adults of mothers who did not smoke during pregnancy, young adults of mothers who did light up during pregnancy had much thicker walls of the carotid arteries in the neck that supply blood to the brain.

Even if the mothers did not smoke during pregnancy, having a father who smoked during gestation was also associated with thicker neck or "carotid" arteries. The association was strongest when both parents smoked during pregnancy.

Dr. Cuno S. P. M. Uiterwaal, from University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands, and colleagues also found that young adults of mothers who smoked were more likely to smoke themselves, and these subjects had the greatest increase in carotid artery thickness compared with nonsmokers who were not exposed in the womb to tobacco.

"The interaction between participant's current smoking behavior and maternal smoking during pregnancy could indicate that if the cardiovascular system is exposed to tobacco smoke in utero, the vessels are more vulnerable to tobacco smoke later in life."

On the other hand, current smoking by women who abstained during pregnancy had no effect on the thickness of their children's neck arteries.

"Our findings were largely independent of other cardiovascular disease risk factors," the Uiterwaal and colleagues point out, lending plausibility to the notion of deleterious vascular effects from gestational exposure to tobacco smoke.

SOURCE: Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology, December 2008.

Comments?

Education : How much does spam cost you? Google will calculate

Posted by admin on 2008/11/20 5:39:58 (0 reads)

How much is spam costing your company? Google unveiled a nifty little calculator Wednesday to help you add it up.

It's part of a marketing campaign for Google Message Security, the online spam-filtering service based on the Postini technology Google acquired last year. "We know in these tougher economic times that companies are trying to figure out how they can save," said Adam Dawes, a Google product manager.

To figure out the cost of spam, you enter things like the number of workers at your company, how much you pay them, how much spam they have to deal with, and presto: Google figures out how many days (and dollars) in lost productivity this represents. Of course it also tells you how long it would take for Google's service to pay for itself at your shop.

For companies doing their spam-fighting in-house, there's also a "Total Cost of Ownership" calculator to show how inexpensive Google thinks its service really is.

Last year, Nucleus Research reported that spam costs U.S. companies $712 per employee each year. A $31,000-per-year employee spending 16 seconds each on 21 spam messages per day would cost about this much, according to Google's calculator. That adds up to about $70 billion per year in lost productivity, Nucleus said.

While Google may be helping people figure out how much spam costs, the company could do a thing or two to lower spam itself, said Richard Cox, chief information officer with the Spamhaus antispam group.

He would like to see Google do more to block spammers from using Gmail service and to start including the IP addresses of Gmail senders in its message headers. "If you could see how many anonymous Gmail drop boxes are being used as the registration addresses for domains that are being used in spam, you'd understand just how much this is costing the community," he said of Gmail spam.

Source: InfoWorld: Top News

Comments?

Software : Microsoft drops OneCare antivirus product

Posted by admin on 2008/11/19 6:14:42 (0 reads)

Two years after trying to build a consumer antivirus business, Microsoft has decide to throw in the towel.

The software vendor said Tuesday that it will discontinue retail sales of its Windows Live OneCare product at the end of June next year, and instead offer Windows users free antivirus software, code-named Morro.

"In order for us to focus on delivering this new security solution to millions of customers around the world, we have decided to phase out Windows Live OneCare," Microsoft wrote in a blog posting Tuesday.

Morro is expected to ship by the end of 2009 and online OneCare sales will be gradually phased out sometime after that.

Designed to appeal to people who have not bought antivirus software, Morro will use less system resources than OneCare. It will also have fewer features. It will protect PCs from malicious programs like viruses and Trojans, but will not include the systems management and backup capabilities that come with OneCare.

The free antivirus software will be available in the same markets where OneCare is currently sold, Microsoft said. OneCare subscribers will continue to receive support through the end of their subscriptions.

Microsoft shook up the consumer antivirus market when it began selling OneCare in May 2006. Antivirus vendors worried that Microsoft would use its desktop monopoly to push customers to the product, and OneCare itself represented a reinvention of the antivirus category, with its backup and management features and its three-user licensing model.

But the product did not perform well in reviews and ultimately failed to challenge the dominance of antivirus leaders like Symantec and McAfee.

Source: InfoWorld: Top News

Comments?

Education : Too little sleep tied to increased cancer risk

Posted by admin on 2008/11/19 6:05:08 (0 reads)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Regular exercise can reduce a woman's risk of cancer, but the benefits may slip away if she gets too little sleep, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

The study involving 5,968 women in Maryland confirmed previous findings that people who do regular physical activity are less likely to develop cancer.

But when the researchers looked at the women ages 18 to 65 who were in the upper half in terms of the amount of physical exercise they got per week, they found that sleep appeared to play an important role in cancer risk.

Those who slept less than seven hours nightly had a 47 percent higher risk of cancer than those who got more sleep among the physically active women, the researchers reported at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

"We think it's quite interesting and intriguing. It's kind of a first look into this. It isn't something that has been widely studied," James McClain of the National Cancer Institute, part of the U.S. government's National Institutes of Health, said in a telephone interview.

McClain, who led the study, said it is unclear exactly how getting too little sleep may make one more susceptible to cancer. "Getting adequate sleep has been long associated with health," McClain said.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls sleep loss an under-recognized public health problem, saying Americans are getting less and less slumber. The CDC said the percentage of adults reporting sleeping six hours or fewer a night increased from 1985 to 2006.

Sleep experts say chronic sleep loss is associated with obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, cardiovascular disease, depression, cigarette smoking and excessive drinking.

In addition, research had shown that people who get regular exercise have a reduced risk of breast, colon and other types of cancer. Experts think the effects of exercise on the body's hormone levels, immune function and body weight may play an important role.

Comments?

(1) 2 3 4 ... 139 »