Reports Reuters:

Germs that make their home in the gut may help cause obesity and a range of health-threatening symptoms that go along with it, researchers reported on Thursday.

Health

It could be that certain bacteria cause inflammation that can affect appetite as well as inflammatory bowel conditions like Crohn’s disease and colitis, the researchers reported in the journal Science.

In other words, the germs make you overeat, Andrew Gewirtz of Emory University in Atlanta and colleagues reported.

“Previous research has suggested that bacteria can influence how well energy is absorbed from food, but these findings demonstrate that intestinal bacteria can actually influence appetite,” Gewirtz said.

“The obesity epidemic is driven by people eating too much, but why are people eating more?”

Gewirtz said the research suggests that bacteria may play a role — perhaps a population of bacteria that thrive because other, competing organisms have been wiped out by antibiotics, access to clean water and other factors of modern life.

His team stumbled on the findings by accident.

Find out more.

Reports Reuters:

Foodborne illnesses cost the United States $152 billion in health-related expenses each year, according to a study released by consumer and public health groups on Wednesday.

Food safety advocates are hoping that the study will boost efforts in Congress to overhaul the nation’s antiquated food safety system.

Dozens of pathogens, many of them unknown, creep into the food supply each year, sickening millions. The price tag includes medical costs, lost productivity and quality-of-life, according to a study from the Produce Safety Project.

“This is significantly more than previous official estimates and it demonstrates the serious burden that foodborne illness places on society,” said Sandra Eskin, a spokeswoman with Make Our Food Safe Coalition, a group of consumer, public health and other groups pushing for stronger food safety laws.

The latest study to delve into foodborne illnesses comes as Congress works to craft legislation that would mark the first major overhaul of the food safety system in 50 years.

The House passed its bill last July and the Senate, which has been bogged down with healthcare and regulatory reform, is expected to act this year.

“My hope… is that the sobering numbers of this report will compel the Senate to act immediately on food safety legislation,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who has vigorously pushed for food safety reform. “We literally cannot afford to wait.”

Find out more.

Reports Reuters:

Working with the food industry to cut salt intake by nearly 10 percent could prevent hundreds of thousands of heart attacks and strokes over several decades and save the U.S. government $32 billion in healthcare costs, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

U.S.  |  Health

Eating too much salt is a major cause of high blood pressure, which the Institute of Medicine, one of the National Academies of Sciences, last week declared a “neglected disease” that costs the U.S. health system $73 billion a year.

Several governments including the United States are looking for solutions to curb salt intake as a way to head off future heart attacks and strokes that help drain healthcare systems.

The study by a team at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System in California used a computer model to measure the impact of two different scenarios for reducing salt intake on a population level — a voluntary collaboration with the U.S. food industry and a national tax on salt.

They found the voluntary program, based on a similar salt-reduction campaign in Britain, to be the most effective.

The team estimated that a government-industry effort could cut Americans’ salt intake by 9.5 percent.

Read more.

Check out a video from CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta for a walk-through of an operating room, in which he points out common procedural tools and their costs:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/health/2010/02/24/gupta.medical.cost.breakdown.cnn

Reports Reuters:

Fans of the blockbuster “Avatar” applaud the film’s use of 3D technology, but the Italian government believes it may also present a health risk.

The health ministry said Thursday it had confiscated about 7,000 sets of 3D glasses from Italian cinemas and could collect more of them.

Officials said the glasses pose hygiene problems if they are not properly cleaned between screenings, and that the confiscated glasses did not display tags proving they would not cause short-term vision problems to users.

The missing glasses have had little effect on the success of “Avatar” in Italy, where it remains the top-grossing film in the country.

Anica, the Italian cinema and audiovisual association, declined comment.

Writes Discover magazine:

Does your diabetes medication smell like dead fish or smelly socks? You’re not alone.

Many patients who took the common diabetes drug metformin report being so disgusted by its smell that they stopped taking it altogether, doctors say. Patients who do take the drug often feel nauseated and report burping up an unpleasant after-taste.

The problem of the malodorous medicine came to light after scientists decided to check whether nausea, commonly reported among patients on metformin, was a physical side effect caused by the drug’s ingredients or simply a result of the stink the pill was raising. Their results, published in the February issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, revealed that the tablet’s smell just made people want to throw up.

Researcher J. Russell May told HealthDay News:

“Metformin is an excellent drug, but the immediate-release formulation may have an odor to it. The smell is fishy or like the inside of an inner tube, and in a patient’s mind, because it smells like something that has gone bad, they may think the drug isn’t good.”

The doctors observed that patients who took the coated, extended-release version of the medication did not report any trouble with smell or unpleasant after-taste, but the ones who took the regular version were loathe to swallow the stinky pill. Some pharmacists said they recognized metformin by its unique “old locker-room sweat sock” odor.

Doctors suggest that instead of turning away from the medication altogether, patients could ask for an extended-release version of metformin. If that’s not available and if they don’t want to switch medications, they may have to suck it up, hold their noses, and swallow their fishy-smelling pills.

Reports Reuters:

Tens of thousands of American adults die each year from pneumonia, influenza and other infectious diseases that could be prevented by routine vaccinations, according to a report released Thursday.

Only about a third of seniors were vaccinated in 2008 against pneumonia, a complication of seasonal flu, according to the report released by the Trust For America’s Health, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Merck and Co makes a vaccine called Pneumovax to protect adults against Streptococcus pneumoniae infections, which cause pneumonia and a range of other illnesses. But U.S. health officials say only about a quarter of adults who should get it ever do.

Children are protected against seven strains of S. pneumoniae bacteria with Pfizer Inc’s Prevnar.

Overall, adult vaccination rates are particularly low for minority groups, according to the report.

Sixty-nine percent of older whites received the seasonal flu vaccine in 2008, compared to 53 percent of older African Americans and 51 percent of older Hispanics, the report found.

Only 36 percent of all adults were vaccinated against the seasonal flu in 2008 and only about 2 percent of adults had tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping cough vaccines, the report found.

Limited health insurance coverage, high out-of-pocket costs and limited access are major reasons adults skip vaccinations, but misinformation is also an obstacle, the report said.

Read more.

Reports the New York Times:

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time.

As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings, amounting to some two or three millimeters’ shift one way or the other. Nevertheless, the directionality was clear and consistent.

“When we talk about time, we often use spatial metaphors like ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you’ or ‘I’m reflecting back on the past,’ ” said Lynden K. Miles, who conducted the study with his colleagues Louise K. Nind and C. Neil Macrae. “It was pleasing to us that we could take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.”

The new study, published in January in the journal Psychological Science, is part of the immensely popular field called embodied cognition, the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own.

“How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body,” said Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam. “We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.”

…

You say a person is warm and likable, as opposed to cold and standoffish? In one recent study at Yale, researchers divided 41 college students into two groups and casually asked the members of Group A to hold a cup of hot coffee, those in Group B to hold iced coffee. The students were then ushered into a testing room and asked to evaluate the personality of an imaginary individual based on a packet of information.

Students who had recently been cradling the warm beverage were far likelier to judge the fictitious character as warm and friendly than were those who had held the iced coffee.

Or maybe you are feeling the chill wind of social opprobrium. When researchers at the University of Toronto instructed a group of 65 students to remember a time when they had felt either socially accepted or socially snubbed, those who conjured up memories of a rejection judged the temperature of the room to be an average of five degrees colder than those who had been wrapped in warm and fuzzy thoughts of peer approval.

Read more.

Heart disease patients have long been encouraged to eat more fish or take fish oil supplements containing omega-3 fatty acids. The reason? People who do, tend to live longer.

Now, some say a study out this evening in the Journal of the American Medical Association might explain why.

Specifically, the researchers behind the study report that for heart disease patients, omega-3 fatty acids may protect against death and illness by slowing biological aging.

However, the findings were met with skepticism from some cardiac experts who said the study had serious limitations.

Find out more.

Reports Reuters:

Bacteria such as methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) are a growing problem in hospitals and researchers are anxious to understand how they evolve.

Norwegian researchers said they had found little sign of such microbes in the feces of polar bears in the remote Arctic, suggesting the spread of resistance genes seen in the droppings of other animals may be due to human influence.

In contrast to the results from polar bears on the Svalbard archipelago, antibiotic resistance has been discovered in a range of animals including deer, foxes, pigs, dogs and cats that live close to humans.

Trine Glad of the University of Tromso said her team’s research, published on Thursday in the journal BMC Microbiology, was important evidence in the debate as to whether resistance occurs naturally or is caused by exposure to human antibiotics.

The rise of superbugs is prompting some drug companies to look again at antibiotics, a field that has been neglected in recent years. Both AstraZeneca and Sanofi-Aventis have signed new antibiotic research collaborations this week.