New York City Battling Public Bedbug Infestation

According to New York City health officials, one out of every 15 New Yorker battled bed bugs in the last year. They have announced a plan to fight the spreading infestation, which has been discovered in theaters, clothing stores, office buildings, housing projects, and even upscale hotels.
Bed bugs are small (5-7mm), oval, non-flying insects that feed by sucking blood from humans or animals. Adult bed bugs are reddish brown in color and can live in any area of the home, but are most common in areas where people sleep, including mattresses, box springs, and bed frames. While they are often thought of as only living in areas of poor sanitation, they do live and thrive even in clean environments.
Health officials have reported that bedbugs have rapidly multiplied throughout New York and many other US cities in recent years. Across the country, the National Pest Management Association notes a 57% increase in calls over the past five years for bedbug infestation.
Read: Bedbug Infestations on the Rise and Here to Stay
Bed bugs, once thought to be eliminated because of widespread use of the pesticide DDT in the 1940’s and 50’s, are thought to be on the rise because of the decreasing use of pesticides and due to immigration and travel from the developing world. Crowded living quarters can also facilitate the spread of bugs.
People who have bedbugs often never see them. The most obvious signs are bites which appear as small red skin bumps, blood on bed sheets and their waste, which looks like black pepper. They are known for being extremely difficult to eradicate, and can go a year without feeding.
One major roadblock to stopping the spread of bedbugs is lack of knowledge about prevention and misinformation about treatment. Acting on a report by a government advisory board, New York City is re-appropriating $500,000 of health department money to begin the first phase of a “bedbug battle plan.” Some of the money will go toward creating an online portal where New Yorkers can find information about avoiding bedbugs as well as how to treat their homes.
Read: New Disposable Cover Keeps Bed Bugs at Bay
Some tips for dealing with bedbugs:
• When you travel, look for signs of bedbugs in your hotel room. Check the bedding, headboard, upholstered furniture and drawers where clothing will be stored.
• In the home, check cracks and crevices with a bright flashlight. A hot air dry can also flush them out of their hiding places.
• In addition to checking bedding, check clothing, suitcases, and pocketbooks as well, as bed bugs can use them as a way to travel from one place to another.
• Bedding, linens, curtains, rugs, and clothes from infested homes must be washed in hot water.
• Mattresses, furniture and floors must be vacuumed. Dispose of the vacuum bag (or the debris from a bagless vacuum) in a sealed plastic bag.
• Hire a certified exterminator to apply pesticides is also recommended.

New Checklist To Help Make Surgery Safer

With major surgery now occurring at a rate of 234 million procedures per year – one for every 25 people – and studies indicating that a significant percentage result in preventable complications and deaths, WHO today launched a new safety checklist for surgical teams to use in operating theatres, as part of a major drive to make surgery safer around the world.
%26quot;Preventable surgical injuries and deaths are a growing concern,%26quot; said Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of WHO. %26quot;Using the checklist is the best way to reduce surgical errors and improve patient safety.%26quot;
Several studies have shown that in industrial countries major complications occur in 3% to 16% of inpatient surgical procedures, and permanent disability or death rates are about 0.4% to 0.8%. In developing countries, studies suggest death rates of 5% to 10 % during major operations. Mortality from general anaesthesia alone is reported to be as high as one in 150 in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Infections and other postoperative complications are also a serious concern around the world. These studies suggest that about half of these complications may be preventable.
"Surgical care has been an essential component of health systems worldwide for more than a century," said Dr Atul Gawande, a surgeon and professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. "Although there have been major improvements over the last few decades, the quality and safety of surgical care has been dismayingly variable in every part of the world. The Safe Surgery Saves Lives initiative aims to change this by raising the standards that patients anywhere can expect."
The Safe Surgery Saves Lives initiative is a collaborative effort led by the Harvard School of Public Health. More than 200 national and international medical societies and ministries of health are working together to reduce avoidable deaths and complications in surgical care. The WHO surgical safety checklist, developed under the leadership of Dr Gawande, identifies a set of surgical safety standards that can be applied in all countries and health settings.
Preliminary results from a thousand patients in eight pilot sites worldwide indicate that the checklist has nearly doubled the likelihood that patients will receive proven standards of surgical care. Use of the checklist in pilot sites has increased the rate of adherence to these standards from 36% to 68% and in some hospitals to almost 100%. This has resulted in substantial reductions in complications and deaths in the 1000 patients. Final results on the impact of the checklist are expected in the next few months.
The checklist identifies three phases of an operation, each corresponding to a specific period in the normal flow of work: before the induction of anaesthesia ("sign in"), before the incision of the skin ("time out") and before the patient leaves the operating room ("sign out"). In each phase, a checklist coordinator must confirm that the surgery team has completed the listed tasks before it proceeds with the operation.
For example, during the "sign in" phase, the coordinator should check whether the surgical site on the patient’s body was properly marked and whether the patient’s known allergies were checked. During the "sign out" phase, instruments, sponges and needles should be counted to check that none of these is accidentally left behind in the patient’s body.

Drug Products Seized from Tri-Med Labs by Federal Government

Earlier this month U.S. Marshal seized prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) drug products from Tri-Med Laboratories Inc. in Somerset, N.J. at the request of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The seizure warrant, issued by the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey and unsealed this week, shows the drugs are unapproved and adulterated new drugs.
The drug products manufactured and distributed by Tri-Med are unapproved new drugs under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act and therefore are not permitted to be introduced into interstate commerce. The products have not been proven safe and effective for their intended use.
Some of the products involved include:
• Pseudo DM GG Syrup (Dextromethorphan Hydrobromide 15 mg, Pseudoephedrine HCI 40 mg, guaifenesin 100 mg)
• Triall Syrup (Phenylephrine Hydrobromide 8mg, Chlorpheniramine Maleate 2mg, Metscopolamine Nitrate 6.75 mg)
• Triplex DM Liquid (Dextromethorphan Hydrobromide 15 mg, Pytamine Maleate 12.5 mg, Phenylephrine HCI 7.5 mg)
• Tenar PSE (Pseudoephedrine HCI, guaifenesin 200 mg)
• Tenar DM (Dextromethorphan Hydrobromide 15 mg, Pseudoephedrine HCI 32 mg, guaifenesin 200 mg)
• Guiatex PE Syrup (guaifenesin 200 mg, Phenylephrine HCI)
The seized products are considered adulterated because they were manufactured under conditions not in compliance with current Good Manufacturing Practice (cGMP) to assure that they meet the identity, quality, and purity standards they claim to possess.
“The FDA is taking this action because Tri-Med has refused to take these unapproved products off the market after it received warning letters and regulatory meetings,” said Dara Corrigan, the FDA’s associate commissioner for regulatory affairs. “This action shows FDA’s commitment to protecting the public health from the dangers of unapproved or adulterated drug products.”
FDA inspections of Tri-Med since 1997 revealed Tri-Med continued to manufacture distribute unapproved, misbranded and adulterated drugs with significant cGMP violations.

Recalled children’s medications pulled from local shelves

Local retailers have pulled popular children’s and infants’ liquid medications including Motrin, Tylenol, Zyrtec and Benadryl from Sacramento store shelves in the wake of a Friday recall of the over-the-counter remedies.
Stores including Rite Aid, Safeway, Target and Walgreen Co. removed infants’ and children’s liquid cough, cold and sore throat treatments from their shelves.
The voluntary recall announced by McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a division of Johnson & Johnson, was triggered by what U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials called “manufacturing deficiencies which may affect quality, purity or potency.”
The deficiencies may include higher-than-specified concentrations of the medicine’s active ingredient, inactive ingredients, and tiny particles, McNeil officials said.
Officials at the FDA said the risk of serious health effects was remote, but told parents and caregivers not to give the products to their children.
“We want to be certain that consumers discontinue using these products and that they know what to do if they have specific concerns about a certain product,” said Food and Drugs Commissioner Margaret Hamburg in a statement.
Generic versions of the recalled products can be used, however.
Store shelves had already been thinned by an earlier recall of Tylenol arthritis pain medication in January. Those dosages have not yet been returned to shelves.
At the Rite Aid at 21st and S streets in midtown Sacramento, customers could still read small black-and-white notices Monday, notifying them of the product pulled four months ago.
The reason for the January recall was an investigation into consumers’ reports of an “unusual moldy, musty or mildew-like odor” that caused stomach distress in a small number of cases, according to Rite Aid notices.
The odor was later traced to a chemical applied to wood used to build wood pallets that transported the medications, according to McNeil officials.
Rite Aid spokeswoman Ashley Flower said she did not know when any of the recalled medications would be returned to Rite Aid shelves.

Sleep On It, Your Memory Will Improve

“I’ll sleep on it” is a phrase people say when they are going to think about something, but what if sleep actually helps you remember new information and improves your memory? Researchers at the University of York and Harvard Medical School suggest that sleep may have such an effect on memory.

Sleep helps people remember new words and enhances memory

Results of the new study are important because it is the first time scientists have been able to observe how sleep has a role in reorganizing new memories and to understand a critical factor in the transfer of information in the process. Researchers utilized two groups of volunteers in their study.
Volunteers in one group were taught new words in the morning and tested on their memory of the words after learning them and then again in the evening, with no sleep in between. These individuals did not improve in their memory of the words during the re-test in the evening.
Volunteers in a second group were taught new words in the evening, after which they immediately took a test. These individuals then slept overnight in a lab and had their brain activity monitored using an electroencephalogram (EEG).
When the volunteers in the second group were retested in the morning after a night of sleep, they were able to remember more words than they had recalled immediately after learning them the night before. They also were able to recognize the words faster, which suggests sleep strengthens new memories.
When researchers evaluated the volunteers’ brainwaves, they found that deep sleep rather than rapid eye movement sleep or light sleep strengthened new memories. Further evaluation showed that volunteers who had more sleep spindles during sleep were better at integrating the new words with existing knowledge.
Sleep spindles are brief and intense bursts of brain activity that indicate information is being transferred between different memory areas in the brain; specifically, the hippocampus and the neocortex. The hippocampus stores memories separately from other memories, while the neocortex contains memories that are linked with other knowledge.
Results of this study suggest that if you “sleep on it,” you could improve your memory. Dr. Jakke Tamminen, the study’s lead author, points out that “New memories are only really useful if you can connect them to information you already know.” He and his team found the “brain activity during sleep that organizes new memories and makes those vital connections with existing knowledge.”