It’s common knowledge that Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. A lucky wind blew a few spores into his Petri dish, and the rest is history.

That’s true as far as it goes, author Lauren Belfer says, but what people forget is that Fleming couldn’t do much with his miraculous discovery because penicillin was so tough to produce. It lay dormant until the outbreak of World War II, and in the meantime, people continued to die from causes as tiny as a scratch on the knee.

Belfer’s new novel, A Fierce Radiance, picks up the story of penicillin just after the outbreak of the war, when pharmaceutical companies were racing to perfect mass-production of the drug.

Belfer tells NPR’s Lynn Neary that the story of penicillin is a family story for her. “For all the years that I knew her, my elderly aunt kept on her bureau a photograph of her brother when he was about 10 years old, sitting in a canoe with his father, having a wonderful time on a summer vacation.”

A year later, Belfer says, the boy was dead. “He died on the Fourth of July, in the 1920s, of a fast-moving infection, and there was nothing his doctors could do.”

Penicillin was notoriously difficult to make. Belfer estimates that when the war broke out in 1939, there were only a few teaspoons of the drug in the entire country. But the pace of development picked up when scientists began looking for new ways to treat infections in battlefield wounds.

“What they found was that the mold, the penicillium mold, grew best in a flat surface. And they just didn’t have the technology to create huge flat surfaces, so they used what was at hand,” Belfer says. “It was very much an at-home kitchen process” using milk bottles and bedpans to grow the precious mold. By 1944, every soldier going ashore on D-Day had penicillin in his kit………

Penicillin was a major military priority, Belfer says, since it was considered a weapon of war. “The United States government took over the production,” she says, “and penicillin was made under the supervision of the same group that was supervising the Manhattan Project for the atomic bomb.”

Because the government controlled the production, it also took over the patents on penicillin, forbidding pharmaceutical companies from profiting from their work on the drug. Much of the intrigue in A Fierce Radiance comes from those companies’ behind-the-scenes race to develop what they call the “cousins” — relatives of penicillin that weren’t subject to government restriction. “This became a billion-dollar industry,” Belfer says. “It did not exist in 1940.”

On top of this tale of war and scientific intrigue, Belfer layers the story of glamorous Life magazine photographer Claire Shipley, who’s been assigned to cover the development of penicillin. “I read every single issue of Life magazine, from 1939 to 1945,” Belfer says, part of an effort to put herself in the shoes of people living through the war.

“I realized that Americans expected that their cities would be bombed. Life magazine gave people advice on what to do during bombing raids. I remember an article about what to do with your pets during bombing raids, because pets weren’t allowed in the shelter. That really brought the war home to me.”

via:Health

THE developers of a new €90 million private hospital in Cork have signed an €8.5 million deal to equip it with the world’s most advanced diagnostic machines.

Can’t remember where you put your glasses? Blanked on your new colleague’s name? “Forgetting these types of things is a sign of how busy we are,” says Zaldy S. Tan, MD, director of the Memory Disorders Clinic at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “When we’re not paying good attention, the memories we form aren’t very robust, and we have a problem retrieving the information later.”

The key, says Harry Lorayne, author of Ageless Memory: Simple Secrets for Keeping Your Brain Young, is to get your brain in shape. “We exercise our bodies, but what good is that great body if you don’t have the mental capabilities to go with it?” Sure, you could write everything down, keep organized lists and leave electronic notes on your BlackBerry, cell phone or PDA. But when you don’t have access to those aids, or if you want to strengthen your brain, try these expert-recommended strategies to help you remember.

PLUS:op 10 Tips for a Healthy Brain

Brain Freeze: “What the heck is his name?”

1. Pay attention. When you’re introduced to someone, really listen to the person’s name. Then, to get a better grasp, picture the spelling. Ask, “Is that Kathy with a K or a C?” Make a remark about the name to help lock it in (“Oh, Carpenter — that was my childhood best friend’s last name”), and use the name a few times during the conversation and when you say goodbye.

2. Visualize the name. For hard-to-remember monikers (Bentavegna, Wobbekind), make the name meaningful. For Bentavegna, maybe you think of a bent weather vane. Picture it. Then look at the person, choose an outstanding feature (bushy eyebrows, green eyes) and tie the name to the face. If Mr. Bentavegna has a big nose, picture a bent weather vane instead of his nose. The sillier the image, the better.

PLUS: 11 Healthy Ways to De-Stress With Food

3. Create memorable associations. Picture Joe Everett standing atop Mount Everest. If you want to remember that Erin Curtis is the CEO of an architectural firm, imagine her curtsying in front of a large building, suggests Gini Graham Scott, PhD, author of 30 Days to a More Powerful Memory.

4. Cheat a little. Supplement these tips with some more concrete actions. When you get a business card, after the meeting, jot down a few notes on the back of the card (“red glasses, lives in Springfield, went to my alma mater”) to help you out when you need a reminder…… (more…)

Fasting is simply the restriction of our usual eating. Whether a fruit fast or a water fast or a fast from meat, or beef or sweets, fasting is a restriction of our food, a diet.
Fasting can be a real life saver for the overweight person. The benefit of fasting is not in weight loss. Fasting will make you lose weight. Water fast will result in an average of 1 to 2 pounds per day of weight loss. But that is not the benefit of fasting for weight loss. The power of fasting is not in losing weight during the fast, but in gaining control of your appetite….. (more…)

April 1, 2010 — The message is hammered home every time we turn on the TV: Taking a daily multivitamin can help improve our overall health and well-being and may even protect against diseases like cancer. But now a new study suggests that this seemingly healthy habit may actually increase the risk of breast cancer.

The new findings appear online in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

In the study of more than 35,000 Swedish women aged 49 to 83, 25.5% said they took multivitamins. None of the women had cancer when the study began. During about 10 years of follow-up, 974 women were diagnosed with breast cancer, and 293 of these diagnoses occurred among the 9,017 women who reported using multivitamins.

Overall, women who reported taking multivitamins were 19% more likely to develop breast cancer than their counterparts who said they did not take daily multivitamins. These findings held after the researchers adjusted for other risk factors including family history, advancing age, body mass index, smoking status, and alcohol use.

“The potential health benefits or adverse effects associated with multivitamin use are of great public health importance [and] the observed association is of concern and merits further investigation,” conclude the researchers, who were led by Susanna C. Larsson, PhD, of the division of nutritional epidemiology at the National Institute of Environmental Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

Possible Reasons for Breast Cancer Risk

So how could something that is supposed to be so good for you actually cause breast cancer?

The study could not establish cause and effect, but it did show an association of multivitamin use and increased risk of breast cancer.

There may be some biologically plausible reasons that multivitamins can increase breast cancer risk, the researchers say. For one, folic acid, an ingredient in many multivitamins, may increase breast density, which could potentially stimulate the development of cancer.

Some studies have also linked iron and zinc to increased cancer risk, though there have also been other studies that showed no association between these ingredients and cancer risk, the researchers say.

“There may be some components within a multivitamin that could potentially increase breast cancer risk, but the problem is we don’t know which component,” says Katherine Lee, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio…. (more…)

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is promoting his health care overhaul’s benefits for small businesses as he tries to rally public support behind the new law scorned by Republicans and protesters.

A speech Thursday in Portland, Maine, is the second in a series of planned appearances to plug the sweeping changes coming to health care. Obama was to focus the event on the short- and long-term benefits for small companies, which have suffered during the economic downturn.

After speaking in Maine, Obama planned to travel to Boston to attend two fundraisers for the Democratic National Committee. His trip comes as much of the Northeast is suffering through devastating flooding caused by record-setting rainfall.

One of Rhode Island‘s Democratic congressmen, Rep. Jim Langevin, sent a letter to the White House Thursday requesting that Obama view the damage to that state during his travels Thursday. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano plans to travel to Rhode Island on Friday.

The president remains on a campaign to sell his newly passed health plan to America, emphasizing different aspects as he goes.

Under the plan, businesses that have 25 or fewer employees with average annual wages of less than $50,000 will receive tax credits this year if they provide health care coverage to their workers. Those credits are expected to increase by 2014, with 4 million small businesses benefiting, according to the White House.

Businesses that may be eligible for the tax credits will receive letters from the government in the coming weeks, another step in the administration’s efforts to tout the benefits of the health care overhaul.

Also starting in 2014, companies with up to 100 employees will be able to buy insurance through new state-based purchasing pools, or exchanges, with the goal of giving small businesses the same kind of purchasing power as larger companies. Twenty-two million self-employed Americans will also be able to purchase insurance through the exchanges…. (more…)

A $657.5 million settlement reached between the city and 9/11 rescue and cleanup workers on March 11 must be renegotiated, a U.S. District Court Judge said.

Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein rejected the proposed settlement on March 19 and stated, in court, that he did so because the settlement did not offer enough compensation to the workers for the illnesses they have suffered since they worked at or near Ground Zero.

Hellerstein added that he – as opposed to a claims administrator – would supervise any new renegotiation and that the lawyer’s payout, about a third of the settlement, should come out of the same fund that will pay the lawyers for the city, leaving more for the injured worke

“I think the grounds on which [Hellerstein] rejected [the settlement] was strong,” said Daniel Coates, an immigration organizer at the community group Make The Road New York, who has worked with many Queens-area cleanup workers. “But now the process will take longer given the dire situations some of these workers find themselves in.”

According to reports, close to 10,000 workers took part in the lawsuit against the city. These workers claimed that because of the toxins and chemicals – such as cement, glass dust, asbestos, fiberglass, alkaline, and lead – in the air at Ground Zero, they developed respiratory problems including asthma, sinusitis, rhinitis, persistent cough, chronic bronchitis and emphysema, as well as lung scarring, lung cancer, gastrointestinal tract cancer, heart disease and mesothelioma.

As of March 31, 2009, more than 51,000 World Trade Center (WTC) responders nationwide had met eligibility and enrolled in the World Trade Center medical monitoring and treatment programs, according to Fred Blosser, a National Institutes for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) spokesperson.

Some of these workers have had to quit work because they are too sick. As of September 11, 2009, at least 817 had died…. (more…)

STANFORD, Calif. – A new study helps dispel mounting confusion over the safety of blockbuster anemia drugs — erythropoiesis-stimulating agents — for people with kidney disease requiring dialysis, as federal regulators prepare to decide whether to impose additional restrictions on their use.

ESAs are the most expensive drugs reimbursed by Medicare in patients requiring long-term dialysis, costing the agency nearly $2 billion annually.

The new study, to be published March 3 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, zeroes in on which treatment practices for the anemia of patients on dialysis for severe kidney disease might be beneficial and which are potentially harmful. The finding: More-aggressive ESA treatment practices among the most-anemic patients were associated with better outcomes; by contrast, aggressive treatment of patients with milder red-blood-cell deficiencies was associated with increased mortality.

The study’s senior author, Wolfgang Winkelmayer, MD, ScD, associate professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, conducted the research while on the faculty at Harvard Medical School.

The findings are certainly timely. Over the next four months, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are set to review the use of ESAs in treating anemia in patients with chronic kidney disease. “Eliminating coverage or severely restricting marketability of ESAs might mean pouring out the baby with the bath water,” said Winkelmayer, “We give glimpses that show that such extreme action might not be warranted.”

Anemia, a common complication of kidney disease, is the result of too few healthy red blood cells, leading to a decrease in the blood’s ability to carry oxygen. There are currently three ESA products used in the United States to treat it: darbepoetin alfa, marketed by the biotech company Amgen as Aranesp, and epoetin alfa, marketed, respectively, by Amgen as Epogen and by Johnson & Johnson as Procrit.

While ESAs were approved for use for the treatment of anemia in 1989, questions have emerged in recent years over their safety for different subsets of patients….. (more…)

You’re never too young—or too old—to start lowerig your heart disease risk. Of course, exercising, eating healthy and reducing stress are key throughout life, but due to physiological changes that happen as we age, certain risk factors do become more of a threat.

In Your 20s

Stub Out a Social Smoking Habit
Smoking is enemy number one when it comes to heart disease, and even just a few cigarettes can do damage: New research from McGill University in Montreal found that smoking just one cigarette a day stiffens your arteries by a whopping 25 percent. Plus, smoking erases the hormonal advantage you have from estrogen, which can leave you vulnerable to a heart attack before menopause, explains Dr. Bonow.

Don’t Ignore the Birth Control Factor
Remember that hormonal contraceptives slightly increase the risk of blood clots, so if you’ve ever had one, make sure to discuss it with your doctor before going on birth control. And if you’re currently a smoker, don’t take oral contraceptives, because the combo can be especially dangerous, says Sharonne N. Hayes, MD, director of the Women’s Heart Clinic at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Watch Your Alcohol Intake
Moderate amounts of alcohol can have a beneficial effect on your heart. (By “moderate,” we mean one drink a day or about 5 ounces—but many restaurants serve far more than that.) Overdoing it can raise triglycerides, increase blood pressure and lead to weight gain, thanks to all those empty calories.

In Your 30s

Get a Grip on Stress
When you’re juggling career and family, it’s crucial to find stress management techniques that work. “Untamed stress has a direct negative impact on heart health,” says Dr. Stevens. “The constant bombardment of adrenaline raises blood pressure and destabilizes plaque in your arteries, making it likely to cause a clot or heart attack.”… (more…)