Written on July 20, 2011 by admin
Two California lawmakers have introduced a bill that would pre-empt local governments from passing laws banning male circumcision and limit the enacting of such legislation to the state.
Assemblyman Mike Gatto of Los Angeles said Thursday the bill came in response to recent efforts at the local level, including a November ballot measure to ban circumcision in San Francisco. A similar ban failed to make the ballot in Santa Monica.
San Franciscos measure would prohibit circumcision of males under the age of 18, making it a misdemeanor punishable by fine or jail.
If the measure is still on the ballot at election time, San Francisco would be the first city in the U.S.
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Written on July 20, 2011 by admin
Kit Parker doesn’t just study traumatic brain injury in the lab, he’s also seen it at close range while serving in Afghanistan. He has since made it his mission to untangle the mechanisms that underlie the brain’s response to jarring injuries, which often result from proximity to an explosion.
After the initial impact, the connections between nerve cells in the brain retract and sometimes the blood vessels constrict (vasospasm). Research by Parker, a bioengineer at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues suggests that a signalling pathway involved in cell contraction — the Rho–ROCK pathway — is responsible for both of these effects.
Their findings are reported in two papers, one published today by PLoS ONE and the other last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Written on July 19, 2011 by admin
Lives will be put in danger if health bosses press ahead with plans to close the A&E at Belfast City Hospital, a top public service union has warned.
The announcement that the emergency department is to be axed has prompted an angry response from the union, Unite, which has expressed serious concerns over proposals to overhaul emergency care at Lagan Valley Hospital and in the Belfast Health & Social Care Trust.
Regional officer Kevin McAdam said: “I am seriously concerned by these proposals and have no doubt lives will be put at risk if these changes happen.”
Health Minister Edwin Poots revealed A&E services at Lagan Valley are to be scaled back from next month due to a shortage of junior doctors and that he must cut the number of casualty units in Belfast to protect patients.
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Written on July 19, 2011 by George Moowattin
Dr Chaand Nagpaul
The motion proposes an ‘active central unit’ that clinicians can contact with any concerns, including ‘details of inappropriate disciplinary action by health employers’.
It cites cases in which NHS whistleblowers were ‘silenced and sacked’, exposed in an investigation by the magazine Private Eye, as evidence that clinicians need extra support.
The motion has been signed by 18 MPs, most of them Labour and Liberal Democrats. A sole Cons
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Written on July 19, 2011 by admin
A global initiative to eradicate polio by the end of 2012 is not on track, due to a funding gap, weak political leadership in some nations and persistent problems with vaccination campaigns, a group of international health experts said on Wednesday. In its second quarterly report, the Independent Monitoring Board of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) warned that, even though worldwide cases of polio have been cut by 99 percent since 1988, the disease will resurge if it is not completely stamped out. Liam Donaldson, the monitoring board’s chair and Britain’s former chief medical officer, said eradicating polio by the end of next year is “still feasible,” but requires more urgency and intensified focus.
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