UAE widENS cRAckdOwN; MORE ISlAMiStS ... - Kuwait Times

BOHEME: In this file picture taken on August 7, 2007 nine-week-old baby
gorilla Tatu lays in the arms of her mother Kijivu at the gorilla enclosure
of the Zoo in Prague. A gorilla accidentally hanged himself at the Prague
zoo, five years after gaining the spotlight when his birth was broadcast
live on the internet. Tatu died in the morning while playing in a rope
structure in the gorilla wing, the zoo director said. —AFP
Zoo moves orangutan
to stop her smoking
JAKARTA: Indonesian zookeepers
have moved an orangutan out of visitors’
sight so she’ll no longer smoke lit
cigarettes people regularly throw into
her cage. Taru Jurug Zoo spokesman
Daniek Hendarto said Thursday that
Tori and her male companion, Didik,
were moved Wednesday to a small
island within the zoo. There are four
endangered orangutans at the zoo in
the Central Java town of Solo.
NEW YORK: If you’re having chest pains,
an advanced type of CT scan can quickly
rule out a heart attack. New research
suggests this might be good for hospitals,
but not necessarily for you. These
heart scans cut time spent in the hospital
but didn’t save money, the study
found. They also prompted more tests
and questionable treatments and gave
relatively large doses of radiation to
people at such low risk of a heart attack
that they probably didn’t need a major
test at all.
There is no evidence that adding
these tests saved lives or found more
heart attacks, wrote Dr. Rita Redberg, a
cardiologist at the University of
California, San Francisco in an editorial.
Her commentary accompanied the
study in Thursday’s New England Journal
of Medicine. And since radiation from
the scans can raise the long-term risk of
developing cancer, doctors “may legitimately
ask whether the tests did more
harm than good,” she wrote.
Let’s be clear: None of this changes
the advice to seek help quickly if you’re
having chest pain or other signs of a
heart attack. Any delay raises the risk of
permanent heart damage. But more
than 90 percent of the 6 million people
who go to hospitals each year in the U.S.
with chest pain have indigestion, stress,
muscle strain or some other problem -
not heart disease. Doctors are afraid of
missing the ones who do have it, and
increasingly are using CT scans - a type
of X-ray - with an injected dye to get
detailed views of arteries.
More than 50,000 of these scans were
done in Medicare patients in 2010, and
their use is growing. Far more than that
were done in younger patients like the
ones in this study, who were 54 years
old, on average.
The test requires a substantial dose of
radiation, which can raise the risk of cancer
years down the road. In some cases,
patients might just be told that a doctor
wants the test. They may be too frightened
to question it or unaware they can
refuse or ask about other testing options
without jeopardizing their care.
The aim of the study was to see
whether these heart scans, called coronary
CT angiography, were faster, better
or less expensive than usual care, such
as simpler tests or being kept a while for
observation. Researchers led by Dr. Udo
Hoffmann at Massachusetts General
Hospital enrolled 1,000 patients who
went to one of nine hospitals around the
country during regular daytime, weekday
hours with chest pain or other possible
heart attack symptoms. All showed
no clear sign of a heart attack on initial
tests - an electrocardiogram and blood
work. They were randomly assigned to
further evaluation either with a CT
angiography scan or whatever is standard
at that hospital, such as a treadmill
or other heart tests. Those given the CT
scans spent an average of 23 hours in
the hospital versus 30 hours for the others.
More patients given the scans were
sent home directly from the emergency
room rather than being admitted - 47
percent versus 12 percent.
“Identifying the underlying cause of
The 15-year-old Tori has been
smoking for a decade. She mimics
humans by holding cigarettes casually
between her fingers while visitors
watch and photograph her puffing
away and flicking ashes on the
ground. Hendarto said recent medical
tests show the four primates are in
good condition. The two other orangutans
will be moved later to another
island.— AP
Study questions CT scans
to rule out heart attacks
chest pain more quickly with CT scans
could allow medical care providers to
better allocate limited resources to the
patients who are most in need of treatment”
while letting others go home
faster, said a statement by Dr. Susan
Shurin, acting director of the National
Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, which
sponsored the study. However, the average
cost of care was $4,289 for patients
given the CT scans versus $4,060 for the
others, despite spending seven hours
less in the hospital. That’s because CT
scans led to more follow-up tests and
treatments, even though the burden of
disease was about the same; 8 percent
of both groups turned out to have heart
disease and only 5 of the 1,000 had had
a heart attack.
In the CT group, 29 patients wound
up getting a heart bypass or arteryopening
angioplasty and stent procedures
versus 18 patients in the usual
care group. That suggests overtreatment,
said Dr. W. Douglas Weaver, a former
American College of Cardiology
president from Henry Ford Hospital in
Detroit. “If you look more, you’ll find
more, and the more you’ll do” to treat
whatever is found, said Weaver, who had
no role in the study. He also said time in
the hospital seemed unusually long for
both groups - most hospitals have protocols
to evaluate such cases within 12
hours.
Furthermore, patients fared the same
in the month after their ER visit regardless
of how the hospital evaluated them
for chest pain.
No heart attacks were missed, and no
one died. Those given CT scans had
nearly triple the amount of radiation -
about 14 millisieverts (a measure of
dose) versus less than 5 millisieverts for
the others, some of whom received tests
requiring less radiation. “Exposures of 10
millisieverts have been projected to lead
to 1 death from cancer per 2,000 persons,”
Redberg wrote in her editorial.
“Equally alarming, the testing may
lead to an increased risk of breast cancer
among these patients, many of whom
are middle-aged women.” Radiation risks
are a growing concern - Medicare’s
HospitalCompare website recently started
adding information on inappropriate
radiation exposure rates at the hospitals
it tracks. Many study authors have consulted
for imaging device makers and
radiology groups.
A much larger study comparing CT
scans and other tests for evaluating
heart risks in 10,000 patients is under
way now, but it won’t provide answers
for several years. In the meantime, a
patient’s gender, age, and history of
chest pain or other illnesses such as diabetes
go a long way toward predicting
risk as long as the initial EKG and blood
work suggest no problem, Redberg contends.
“With no evidence of benefit and
definite risks, routine testing in the
emergency department of patients with
a low-to-intermediate risk...should be
avoided,” she wrote.
“The question is not which test leads
to faster discharge of patients from the
emergency department, but whether a
test is needed at all.” —Reuters
HEALTH&SCIENCE
PISA: Once the preserve of science fiction,
increasingly sophisticated robotic devices are
vying for a place side by side with humans in
the real world. At Italy’s Sant’Anna university,
a bionic arm commanded by the human brain
or a limb extension that allows rescuers to lift
rubble after earthquakes are just some of the
futuristic innovations in the pipeline.
“The idea is to get robots out of factories
where they have shown their worth and to
transform them into household machines
which can live together with humans,” says
Professor Paolo Dario, director of the college’s
bio-robotics department. The university in the
historic town of Pisa in Tuscany is a veritable
factory of ideas. Researchers here are working
on projects ranging from a robot that can
come to your door to collect your recycling to
tomatoes that slow the effects of ageing and
plants that survive underwater to help floodprone
regions of the world.
“You can innovate here. Whoever has a
project gets help, ideas are not blocked. We
are investing in individuals,” the rector of
Sant’Anna, Maria Chiara Carrozza, a professor
of bio-robotics said in an interview. The dustcart
looks like the famous R2-D2 from Star
Wars with its laser scanner and location sensors.
The idea is that it can work through
phone bookings to come to your street at a
fixed time to collect your waste.
“We tested it for two months with 15 fami-
MONDAY, JULY 30, 2012
Science fiction comes
to life in Italian lab
Bionic arm commanded by human brain
PISA: A picture taken on July 17, 2012
shows Researcher Paolo Dario, director
of the BioRobotic Institute of the St.
Anna School University in Pisa. —AFP
Aging AIDS epidemic
raises new questions
WASHINGTON: AIDS is graying. By the end
of the decade, the government estimates,
more than half of Americans living with HIV
will be over 50. Even in developing countries,
more people with the AIDS virus are surviving
to middle age and beyond. That’s good
news - but it’s also a challenge. There’s growing
evidence that people who have spent
decades battling the virus may be aging prematurely.
At the International AIDS
Conference this week, numerous studies are
examining how heart disease, thinning bones
and a list of other health problems typically
seen in the senior years seem to hit many
people with HIV when they’re only in their
50s. “I’m 54, but I feel older,” said Carolyn
Massey of Laurel, Md., who has lived with HIV
for nearly 20 years. “When I hear young people
talk about, ‘Well you get HIV and you take
your drugs and you’ll be all right’ - that’s just
not the truth,” she said. “This is a lifelong thing
we’re talking about, and it unfolds every day
on you.” The graying isn’t just because people
like Massey are surviving longer. Some of it
comes from older adults being newly diagnosed,
a trend U.S. health officials say is small
but slowly growing. Yes, grandparents still
have sex - and that’s an age group missed by
all those hip safe-sex messages aimed at
teens and 20-somethings.
“They let down their guard,” is how Dr.
Kevin Fenton of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention puts it. Already, a
third of the nearly 1.2 million people living
with HIV in the U.S. are over 50, and by 2020
half will be, Fenton said at one of numerous
sessions on aging at the world’s largest AIDS
meeting.
People 50 or older accounted for 17 percent
of new HIV diagnoses in 2009, according
to the CDC’s latest data. That’s up from 13
percent in 2001. There aren’t as good counts
in poor regions of the world, where access to
life-saving medications came years later than
in developed countries.
But even in hard-hit sub-Saharan Africa,
home to most of world’s HIV-infected population,
studies suggest 3 million people living
with HIV are 50-plus, said Dr. Joel Negin of the
University of Sydney in Australia. By 2040, he
said, that could reach 9 million. There, challenges
are different. Ruth Waryaro of Kenya,
addressing the conference on her 65th birthday,
said clinic workers hassle her when she
goes to pick up her monthly supply of medication
- not believing a grandmother really
needs it.
“If you’re not strong enough, you just
leave the medication and go home,” said
Waryaro, who raised four children of her own
and now is raising four AIDS orphans. She
also has diabetes and high blood pressure. As
Negin pointedly told the conference, “50 is
not old.” But for years, world health authorities
didn’t even measure HIV in people
beyond age 49. Today, people who are diag-
MADRID: Spain’s conservative government has provoked
a storm among women’s groups with plans to
tighten the country’s abortion laws to make the
procedure illegal in cases where the foetus is
deformed. The government announced Friday it
would alter an abortion law introduced by its
Socialist predecessors in 2010 which gave women
the legal right to abortion on demand for up to 14
weeks of pregnancy.
The 2010 law also allowed women the legal right
to abort up to the 22nd week of pregnancy in cases
where the mother’s health is at risk or the foetus
shows serious deformities. In cases of an extremely
severe serious malformation of a foetus, an abortion
could be carried out at any time if approved by an
ethics committee. But last week Justice Minister
Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon came out strongly against
allowing abortion in cases of a deformed foetus.
“I don’t understand why we should deprive a foetus
of life by allowing abortion for the simple reason
that it suffers a handicap or a deformity,” he said in
nosed and treated early can expect a nearnormal
life-span, Dr. Anthony Fauci, infectious
disease chief at the National Institutes of
Health, told The Associated Press. The new
focus is on what these pioneering survivors
can expect as they reach their 50s, 60s and
beyond. They’re now getting chronic illnesses
such as heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease
and osteoporosis - some of the common
ailments when anyone gets old. But studies
suggest people with HIV may be at higher risk
for some of those illnesses, or get them earlier
than usual.
“It’s almost created a new subspecialty of
medicine,” Fauci said. Perhaps the strongest
evidence links HIV and an increased risk of
heart disease. Some AIDS medications raise
that risk. But in research published for the
AIDS meeting, scientists at Massachusetts
General Hospital uncovered another reason.
They scanned the arteries of people with and
without HIV, and found the HIV patients had
more inflammation inside their arteries, putting
them at risk for the kind of clots that trigger
heart attacks. That’s even though the HIV
patients had their virus well-controlled and
weren’t that old - their average age was 52,
the researchers reported in the Journal of the
American Medical Association.
HIV triggers body-wide inflammation as a
person’s immune system tries to fight the
virus, a process that persists and can quietly
damage organs even with good medications,
CDC’s Fenton said. HIV is not acting in a vacuum,
said Dr. Amy Justice of Yale University,
noting that people’s histories of smoking, for
example, also contribute to inflammation. But
she pointed to data from a Veterans Affairs
study that said older people with HIV use
more medications for other diseases than
HIV-free patients the same age. At the conference,
some older people with HIV lined up to
have their photographs made and their personal
histories recorded, part of a Web project
called “The Graying of AIDS.”
It’s a chance to be counted, and share
knowledge. “We’re so concerned about the
youth factor, we forget about the people
who’ve brought us thus far,” said Massey, the
Maryland woman, who leads an HIV group
called Older Women Embracing Life and
works with churches to raise HIV awareness.
CDC’s Fenton noted that those voices can
help other older adults realize they’re at risk,
when they’re getting back onto the dating
scene after years of monogamous relationships.
Older people don’t use condoms as
much as younger people. “We still have this
huge issue with stigma so thick you can cut it
with a knife,” says Massey, who also wants HIV
testing to become a routine part of health
check-ups. “We have to normalize the conversation.”
The latest installment of Aging
America, the joint AP-APME project examining
the aging of the baby boomers and the
impact that will have on society.— AP
an interview published in conservative daily La
Razon on July 22. On Friday the minister justified his
plans on the grounds that the United Nations’
Convention on the Rights of Persons with
Disabilities urges nations to “adopt all necessary
measures to guarantee the rights of disabled people”.
A collective of women’s rights groups has
planned a protest in Madrid yesterday against the
planned abortion law reform that will get under way
at noon (1000 GMT).
“The reform will send the law back to an era close
to the Franco dictatorship and it distances Spain
from the vast majority of European nations in terms
of women’s rights,” the collective said in a statement.
Santiago Barambio, the head of the Spanish association
of abortion clinics, Acai, and one of the authors
of the 2010 abortion law, accuses the Popular Party
government, in power since December, of hypocrisy.
“It is the peak of cynicism. At every international
conference, all UN health agencies, the World Health
Organisation, the Council of Europe, they all say not
lies living in one of the towns near here.
Everything worked well but there are still
some problems to sort out,” said Pericle
Salvini, a member of the team behind the
project. “First of all it is slow for security reasons
and it sometimes blocks the traffic. Also
it cannot legally be on the road since there is
no type of insurance for this type of robot in
case of an accident,” he said.
Professor Dario also heads up a project
entitled “The Robot Companions for Citizens”
which is one of six contestants for a European
Union prize of one billion euros ($1.2 billion)
in funding spread out over a decade. Marco
Controzzi, who is working on a bionic arm,
says it will operate by using electrodes
attached to the skin or implanted in your
head. “It will move only according to your
intentions,” he said, adding that powering it
would be easy as it can run on just two mobile
phone batteries.
The exoskeleton or “body extender”, a prototype
costing a million euros, meanwhile, is a
kind of armour weighing 160 kilos (353
pounds) which multiplies the strength of its
human user by 20. “The idea is to use this type
of instrument for emergency workers in disasters
like an earthquake,” said engineer Marco
Fontana.—AFP
Humans would be
also-rans in all
species Olympics
PARIS: Human beings would be made to look decidedly
unimpressive were animals allowed to compete in
the Olympics-outperformed by the likes of kangaroos,
gorillas and ostriches, a science paper said Saturday.
Usain Bolt, currently the world’s fastest man, may just
be able to outrun a Dromedary camel but would trail
the cheetah, greyhound and ostrich in a sprint race, said
a feature in the Veterinary Record journal.
“‘Citius, Altius, Fortius’ (faster, higher, stronger) is the
Olympic motto, but if we allowed the rest of the animal
kingdom into the Games ... we could not offer much
competition!” wrote author Craig Sharp. Jamaican track
star Bolt holds the 100m-record of 9.58 seconds, which
translates into a speed of 37.6 kilometres per hour.
The world’s fastest land animal, the cheetah, can
reach speeds of 104 kph, a thoroughbred racehorse 70
kph, a greyhound 69 kph and an ostrich 64 kph, said
Sharp of the Centre for Sports Medicine and Human
Performance at Brunel University in London. The camel
comes in just behind Bolt at 35.3 kph. The 2012
Olympics were officially opened in London on Friday
evening. When it comes to marathon running, the
human athlete could not hold a candle to endurance
animals like camels or sled dogs, and he would also be
beaten in the long jump by the kangaroo (12.8 meters
compared to the human record of 8.95 m). The high
jump record of 2.45 m would be smashed by the springbok
gazelle, which can bound over three metres into
the air, and the snakehead fish which can leap over four
metres out of water.— AFP
FRIEDRICHSKOOG: Two seals swim in the water
at the seal nursery in Friedrichskoog, northern
Germany yesterday. A young seal “Fips” was
found at a shipyard in Hamburg at the beginning
of July and was brought to the nursery in
Friedrichskoog. —AFP
Spain angers feminists with
plan to tighten abortion law
to restrict abortion,” he told AFP. “The minister represents
the extreme right and the ultra-Catholics,
which are perhaps a minority but are very powerful
economically, such as Opus Dei for example,” he
added in a reference to the conservative Roman
Catholic organisation whose name in Latin means
“Work of God”. Trinidad Jimenez, a health minister in
the previous Socialist government who now acts as
the party’s secretary for social policy, called the
planned abortion law changes a “counter-reform”.
“It sets us back 35 years,” she said. Before the
2010 abortion reform, women could have an abortion
only in cases of rape, serious deformity or
when the mother’s mental or physical health was
threatened. The vast majority of the 115,000 abortions
carried out in 2009, the year before the
reform, were performed at private clinics and were
justified on the grounds that the pregnancy posed
a “psychological risk” to the woman. Anti-abortion
groups welcomed the planned abortion law
reform. —AFP