LONDON – For children in Bangladesh, losing a mother – but not a father – can be deadly, a new study says.

Researchers in Bangladesh, Britain and the U.S. used data from population surveys from 1982 to 2005 in Matlab, Bangladesh, to follow what happened to more than 144,800 children. Of those, nearly 15,000 died by age 10.

The experts found that children whose mothers died had about a 24 per cent chance of making it to age 10. Children who didn’t lose their mothers had about an 89 per cent chance.

The effect was particularly dramatic in infants; those aged two to five months who lost their mothers were 25 times more likely to die than babies whose mothers were still alive.

And for children whose fathers died, there was no effect. The study was published Friday in the British medical journal, Lancet.

Experts said the findings should inspire changes in how authorities tackle child health, beyond the usual strategies like child-focused vaccination campaigns and vitamin supplementation.

“Because the mother’s death has such devastating effects on the child’s health and survival, improving the mother’s survival will improve the child’s survival,” said Hussain Yusuf, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yusuf co-wrote an accompanying commentary and was not linked to the study.

Carine Ronsmans, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Lancet study’s lead author, said child health initiatives should include strategies to prevent deaths in all young mothers at childbirth and throughout their lives.

She said that in rural Bangladesh, mothers typically breast-feed their children for at least a year. “Removing that biological link, in an area where formula is not popular, has a particularly big impact on children,” Ronsmans said.

She was surprised the death of fathers didn’t affect children’s survival rates. She suggested that when fathers die, mothers may get help from their extended family or remarry, offsetting the loss.

Experts said it was difficult to know whether the results would apply to other countries. Ronsmans doubted there would be comparable findings in the West, and guessed that child death rates there might be too low to find any effect.

Previous studies in Nepal and Gambia have found had similar results, and experts fear there could be a big problem in Africa, where many children have lost a parent to the AIDS epidemic.

Ronsmans said that without prioritizing women’s health, more children were at risk. “It’s a double loss,” she said. “First you lose the mother, then you lose the child.”

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Online:

www.lancet.com

ATLANTA – Oil has now washed up on the beaches of three Gulf states. How dangerous is it?

Not very, experts say.

People should of course stay away from oil on the beach or in the water, but swallowing a little oil-tainted water or getting slimed by a tar ball is not considered grounds for a trip to the emergency room, health officials say.

“Limited contact is not something that needs to be treated by a physician,” said Doc Kokol, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Health.

It’s been six weeks since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing 11 workers and pouring an estimated 21 million to 45 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Oil has hit beaches in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. And it lurks off the coast of the Florida Panhandle.

Poison control centres have had about 45 calls from people saying they think they got sick from oil spill exposure.

It helps that the spill involves a type of oil called medium sweet crude. It’s considered less hazardous than other forms because it contains fewer toxic sulphur compounds and fewer chemicals that enter the air easily, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But oil is considered toxic. Short exposures may cause only fleeting symptoms. But exposure to large amounts of it day after day for a long time could lead to problems with breathing, thinking and co-ordination, and potentially raise the risk of cancer, said Niladri Basu, a University of Michigan environmental toxicologist.

“Avoidance is the best medicine,” he said.

Children are more sensitive to pollution than adults, and parents should watch for rashes on their skin or dark sticky spots that are hard to wash off, the CDC says.

Long-lasting skin contact with crude oil can cause skin to redden, swell and burn. The problem can get worse if the skin is exposed to the sun.

Oil on bare skin should be washed off as soon as possible. Call the local poison control centre if a rash or other problem develops, health officials advise.

Soap and water, baby oil or petroleum jelly are the best way to remove it. Avoid using kerosene or gasoline. If you get oil in your eyes, rinse them with water for 15 minutes, the CDC says.

Swallowing small amounts of oil – less than a coffee cup – can cause vomiting and diarrhea, but is not likely to have long-lasting effects, government doctors say.

For years bits of tar have shown up on some beaches along the Gulf because of tanker and rig spills and oil seepage from beneath the sea that washes up. Some condominiums, especially in Texas, keep handy tar-remover towelettes for visitors.

The oil spill in the Gulf began washing ashore in Mobile Bay, Alabama, Thursday. At a Confederate fort on the white sand beach, reddish-brown globs appeared. Faith Kaiser and Bertice McPherson had brought rubber gloves and plastic bags to take a look and help clean up.

“It was just sickening to see this coming. We wanted to see it one more time before it was destroyed,” said McPherson, of Mobile.

At least 11 oil spill response workers reportedly have become sick in the past week, suffering flu-like symptoms after patrolling the waters off Gulf Coast beaches.

But response workers – who are trained and generally have safety equipment – are near higher concentrations of oil, chemical dispersants and other substances. The risk to the land-bound public is considered much smaller, health officials say.

Neither the CDC nor the Environmental Protection Agency have set up tracking systems for oil spill-related illnesses. States have, but they don’t all track cases the same way, officials said.

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Associated Press reporter Jay Reeves contributed to this report from Mobile Bay.

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Online:

CDC oil spill page:

http://emergency.cdc.gov/chemical/oil_spill_gm_2010.asp

American Association of Poison Control Centers: http://www.aapcc.org/DNN/

CALGARY -­ The largest pre-natal nutrition study ever conducted in Canada is still looking to recruit thousands of participants in Alberta.

The $5-million Alberta Pregnancy Outcomes and Nutrition (APrON) study, which launched in Calgary and Edmonton last fall, has about 750 subjects on board, but is aiming to get 10,000 people – roughly 5,000 from each city – signed up.

Team leader Bonnie Kaplan, a behavioural researcher with Alberta Health Services and a pediatrics professor at the University of Calgary, said women less than 27 weeks pregnant are encouraged to join the study, which is funded for at least five years through Alberta Innovates Health Solutions.

The study is examining what effect diet has on women and their babies – more specifically, the mother’s mental health; birth outcomes including weight, prematurity and defects; as well as the child’s cognitive function three years later.

Kaplan said the study is longitudinal, so the long-term effects of pregnancy diet can be followed up on.

“We’re creating this as a legacy project so five years down the line, 10 years down the line, 20 years down the line, these people can be tracked if our funding continues,” said Kaplan.

For more information, visit apronstudy.ca or call 403-955-7365.

A first-of-its-kind breast cancer vaccine has been successfully tested on mice.

“We believe that this vaccine will someday be used to prevent breast cancer in adult women in the same way that vaccines prevent polio and measles in children,” said Vincent Tuohy, the study’s lead investigator and an immunologist at Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute Department of Immunology.

“If it works in humans the way it works in mice, this will be monumental. We could eliminate breast cancer.”

The study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, takes a new approach to vaccination.

Cancer is particularly difficult to vaccinate against, because unlike viruses, which the immune system recognizes as foreign invaders, cancer is actually an over-development of the body’s own cells.

That means any vaccine tackling cell overgrowth would end up vaccinating against a patient’s own body, destroying healthy tissues.

But the new vaccine targets the antigen a-lactalbumin ‹ a protein that is found in most breast cancers, but is not found in healthy women, except during lactation.

The researchers tested the vaccine on mice, giving half of them a vaccine with a-lactalbumin and the other half one without it.

None of the mice vaccinated with a-lactalbumin developed breast cancer, while all of the other mice did.

“Most attempts at cancer vaccines have targeted viruses, or cancers that have already developed,” said Dr. Joseph Crowe, director of the Breast Center at Cleveland Clinic. “Dr. Tuohy is not a breast cancer researcher, he’s an immunologist, so his approach is completely different ‹ attacking the tumour before it can develop. It’s a simple concept, yet one that has not been explored until now.”

The next step is to test the vaccine on humans. It could be years before it’s approved and becomes available to the public.

If it does become available, however, Tuohy proposes a strategy in which all women over 40 receive the vaccine, as they are at greater risk of developing breast cancer and are less likely to become pregnant. An inability to breastfeed is a side-effect of the vaccine.

TORONTO – Once upon a time, the idea of purchasing an inexpensive off-the-shelf product to test for pregnancy, or the level of glucose in blood, would have seemed far-fetched.

So is it unrealistic to imagine sitting in front of a computer at home and being diagnosed for diseases, perhaps by blowing into a device or electronically submitting test results from a droplet of blood?

It’s not for experts who gathered recently at a conference organized by the Ontario Centres of Excellence to discuss the future of so-called individualized health care.

They said governments should be investing in making Canada a leader in the field, which will grow exponentially as the baby boomer population ages.

“Personalized medicine to me means empowering the patients and their families to do lots of things that are happening in hospitals by doctors and nurses, and doing that reduces the cost and relaxes the patients and their family,” said Dr. Tofy Mussivand, CEO of the Medical Devices Innovation Institute and director of the Cardiovascular Devices Program at the University of Ottawa.

“Unfortunately, Canada is not doing very well, we are way behind everybody else. We are net users rather than net exporters of medical devices and hopefully this situation will be changed.”

Canadian companies have become technological innovators – Research in Motion with its BlackBerry stands out as one of the biggest examples – and there’s no reason why others can’t become world famous for health-care innovation, experts say.

But one of the biggest barriers is access to capital, both from governments and the private sector, said Spartan Bioscience founder Dr. Paul Lem, who won an award at the conference for best young innovator from the Ontario government.

“How much was the auto bailout? How come we aren’t putting in even a fraction of that into the medical device industry, which I think most experts will acknowledge is going to be driving all the high-value jobs for the next 20 to 30 years,” Lam said.

“Why does it take so much capital? When we look at the history of medical innovations it takes a long time for innovations to diffuse out into the marketplace.

“That means you have to be funding a lot of sales and marketing and a lot of development to get to that position. These things take time, there’s no fast solutions.”

The process and cost of getting products commercialized is hindered by Canada’s tough regulatory system, which has more hurdles than other countries, said Andy Hind of Ascent Consulting.

“The regulatory landscape here in Canada is actually holding the market back. There are technologies … that are being used first in other countries because of the regulatory issues,” he said.

“And this is being raised with Health Canada, yes they are listening, they want to introduce smart regulation, but I’ve been hearing that for the past two years and I don’t see a lot of progress.”

Health Canada, meanwhile, was not able to find an expert to comment on the issue.

Hind said it’s not science fiction to posit that health care will one day be based in people’s homes and added it’s already happening. And many of the technologies involved are not “rocket science,” he added.

“When we push health care down to … (going) into the patient’s own home and getting patients maybe in the future doing their own screening – these technologies are relatively simple and there are pilots going on in other countries,” he said.

“For example, with a simple telemetry technology a patient who’s on a particular treatment regime can go home, because many patients don’t like hospitals. So they would rather go home and they can be monitored in the home with a relatively simple keypad that sends data back.”

Mussivand added it would be helpful if regulations were harmonized with other countries.

“If a gadget is good for heart disease, let’s say in Europe or in the U.S., I don’t think we should have self-made Canadian standards to test that again,” he said.

“If it’s helping the patient in the U.S., why don’t we use the same thing, at no cost to us.”

While tough regulations are a barrier, it does at least help prepare a company to take its product to the rest of the world, said Tony Mason of AJM Technology Consulting.

“We’ve got a tough regulatory system here but if you can get through the Canadian regulations you can do it anywhere in the world – we’re basically set up for being an exporting industry,” Mason said.

“We’ve got lots of good basic research, we just need dollars from the politicians to do the commercialization and take it to the world.”

Lem’s product is a desktop on-demand DNA analyzer for infectious diseases, human genetic testing, food safety and water testing, which he hopes will revolutionize the industry.

“When you want your results, you can get it. Right now the whole DNA industry is characterized by mainframe DNA analyzers at major hospitals and tertiary-care centres,” he said.

“If you walk into your doctor’s office, the doctor will take a sample from you, it gets shipped to a hospital, cued up in a batch and then you have to wait days or weeks to get your result back.

“The same way that mainframe computers went to desktop computers, we’re on the verge of mainframe DNA analyzers going to desktop DNA analyzers. The goal of it is to improve patient outcomes by giving them faster test results.”

He said a big future for individualized health care will be in helping to determine the right diagnosis and treatment for an individual, rather than following a one-size-fits-all approach.

“Right now we have blockbuster drugs that are given to everyone – things like Lipitor or all those drugs from Merck and Pfizer – but we know … 20 to 30 or up to 50 per cent of the patients are non-responders and that’s costing our health-care system a lot of money,” Lem said.

“We’re going to need diagnostic solutions that can actually pinpoint who’s going to respond to those drugs, it’s going to drive that whole push to individualized health care.”

Mussivand said he’s involved with researching how breath can be analyzed instead of taking blood, which could be done “painlessly, inexpensively and outside of hospitals.”

“We know that people with some diseases have different chemicals in their body and one area we could get that chemical easily detected is in breath and or saliva,” he said.

“I hope that technology stays in Canada and is developed in Canada and is exported worldwide (unlike) other technologies that were developed in Canada – many of them – and are right now being sold from other countries including (the U.S) and others in Europe.”

Hind said governments and investors need patience since the technologies may take a long time to develop. But the rewards could be great.

“This is a global megatrend,” he said, “the future vision of a patient doing their own screening from home using the Internet, certainly some people are doing that today but I think we’re many years from that becoming the norm.

“But it’s important to hold that as a vision.”

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – Actor Dennis Quaid has sued the pharmaceutical company that makes the blood thinner heparin, following the overdoses that threatened the lives of his newborn twins three years ago.

Quaid, on behalf of his twins Zoe and Thomas, sued Deerfield, Ill.-based Baxter Healthcare Corp. in Los Angeles Superior Court on Friday. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and alleges that packaging caused the drug mix-up at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

The lawsuit says heparin and a lower-dose version called Hep-Lock are both packaged in similar blue vials with small print on the labels.

The couple sued Baxter in Illinois over the drug’s packaging, but that case was dismissed in 2008.

TORONTO – Toronto Public Health says women who attended a prenatal nutrition class earlier this week have been exposed to chicken pox.

Toronto Public Health says it’s trying to contact women who attended the Canada Prenatal Nutrition Program class on Tuesday afternoon at York Community Services (1651 Keele Street).

Women who attended the class and have not had chicken pox, or are unsure whether they have had chicken pox, are being advised to contact their obstetrician or prenatal health care provider immediately.

Chicken pox poses a serious risk of complications to pregnant women, and can cause severe complications to the fetus.

Pregnant women whose immune status is not known should receive Varicella-zoster immune globulin within 96 hours of exposure.

Health officials say the treatment should be given as soon as possible, and may be effective as late as Saturday afternoon.

OTTAWA – The top scientific groups from the G8 countries say funding for maternal and child health, including initiatives aimed at unsafe abortions, must increase.

The Royal Society of Canada and its counterparts in the other G8 counties note that the risk of a woman dying as a result of pregnancy or childbirth is one in seven in the poorest parts of the world and is more than 80 per cent preventable.

A statement from the groups says up to 40 per cent of maternal and infant deaths could be averted with improved access to contraception services and measures to reduce unsafe abortion.

The statement says abortions performed by unskilled providers or under unhygienic conditions because of local laws banning abortions account for 13 per cent of maternal deaths.

The Harper government has excluded abortion funding in its G8 maternal- and child-health initiative.

The scientific groups say governments and inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations must deal openly with unsafe abortions, and ensure appropriate and accessible treatment of women who develop complications.

“Provision of effective contraception for approximately 200 million women who have none would prevent 23 million unplanned births, 22 million induced abortions and 14,000 pregnancy-related maternal deaths each year,” the statement, released late Tuesday, reads.

The scientific groups also say practices such as female genital mutilation should be eradicated and the misuse of technology of prenatal sex determination for aborting female fetuses should be condemned.

The Royal Academy is the country’s senior national body of distinguished scholars, artists and scientists. Its objective is to promote learning and research in the arts and sciences.

The statement says the community shaping global political priorities for the health of women and children has been fragmented.

“G8 governments should work with international agencies to facilitate regional co-ordination mechanisms for women and children’s health,” it says.

The goal should be reducing child mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015.

Leaders of the world’s G8 and G20 nations gather next month in Ontario.