Otro famoso hospitalizado: Lourdes Gourriel "grave" por afección del corazón

elEconomista.es/

Lourdes Gourriel, uno de los astros del béisbol cubano en las décadas de 1970 y 1980 y padre del afamado Yulieski Gourriel, se encuentra hospitalizado en su natal Sancti Spíritus (centro) aquejado de una deficiencia cardíaca, informó este jueves un medio local.

"Gourriel, uno de los más grandes bateadores cubanos de todos los tiempos, está reportado como grave mejorado por una miocardiopatía dilatada", dijo el especialista en cardiología del centro asistencial Camilo Cienfuegos, Ricardo Rodríguez, citado por la agencia Prensa Latina.

"Evoluciona favorablemente" y "hasta el momento no ha tenido ninguna complicación", precisó el médico sobre el ex jugador de 54 años, campeón olímpico en Barcelona-1992 y seis veces monarca mundial.

Gourriel ingresó el pasado martes al hospital y actualmente "conversa y aparentemente no tiene nada, refiere sentirse bien y goza de plenitud", agregó.

Se trata de una afección en la cual el corazón se debilita y no puede bombear sangre de manera eficiente y puede afectar los pulmones, el hígado y otros sistemas corporales.

Teofilo Stevenson out of Cuban hospital recovering from arterial clot

By Associated Press

HAVANA — Three-time Olympic heavyweight boxing champion Teofilo Stevenson says he’s recovering well after spending two weeks in hospital for an arterial clot.
Stevenson said on Wednesday he was hospitalized on Jan. 13 after doctors detected a clot in an artery near his heart. He spent 15 days in intensive care before being released last week.

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The 59-year-old told The Associated Press in an interview at his home in western Havana that he was exercising and walking on doctors’ orders, and planned to return soon to his work as vice president of the Cuban Boxing Federation.

“I’m fine now,” Stevenson said.

"Heaven Earth" [Documentary of a Peruvian healer]

Top Documentary Films/ by Harald Scherz
HEAVEN EARTH explores the practice and commericalization of amazonian ayahuasca-shamanism in Iquitos.

The feature-length documentary film portrays all day activities of Percy - a peruvian healer and another western ayahuasquero, named Ron. Both live near Iquitos and host nightly ayahuasca ceremonies and retreats, mainly for interested westerners.

Participants of ayahuasca ceremonies, tour operators and –guides, as well as western vision seekers reveal episodes of their internal imagery and recount stories about their journeys.

A growing global pop culture - swinging between psychotherapeutical healing procedure and spiritual sell-out.

H5N1: Cuba: More about the Holguín visitors' sickness (updated)

By Crof/
When I first posted this a few minutes ago, I said Canadian media hadn't said much about the travellers returning from Cuba with vomiting and diarrhea. Then I finally read this morning's Globe and Mail, which says people are still coming back sick. Meanwhile, the TripAdvisor Holguín forum has been jumping with comments on this post: 3 planes with "sick" travelers - Holguin Message Board - TripAdvisor.

I haven't read all 110 answers to the original post, but a lot of them describe some very unsanitary conditions in the resort region. Some of the first commenters say it's Clostridium difficile, but that seems unlikely. The Globe and Mail suggests Norwalk virus (also known as norovirus), which sounds more accurate.

Cuba flights to Ottawa, Toronto, report sick passengers

A flight from Cuba landed in Ottawa with 11 ill passengers. (CBC)

 CBS News-Otawa
Flights from Holguin, Cuba, arriving in Ottawa and Toronto have been flagged by Canadian public health officials after people on board complained of a stomach illness.

The Public Health Agency of Canada confirmed passengers on at least three flights from Cuba to Canada have reported gastrointestinal illnesses. As well, passengers from a fourth flight — arriving in Toronto Friday afternoon — also reported similar symptoms.

The first report came from a flight from Cuba to Ottawa on Tuesday, with seven people reporting similar symptoms. On Thursday, a flight from Cuba to Toronto arrived with 20 passengers reporting similar complaints.

Viral illness

Ottawa and Toronto public health officials, alerted to the trend, were ready when flights landed in their respective cities Friday.

Air Transat Flight 677 with 260 passengers returning from the Cuban tourist destination to Ottawa was delayed and then briefly assessed by quarantine officers at the Ottawa airport early Friday morning after 14 passengers complained of illness.

Paramedics spokesman J.P. Trottier said the illness appeared to be viral.

"Only two were exhibiting signs of symptoms of what we would determine as flu-like symptoms, being nausea, vomiting and diarrhea," said Trottier.

Passengers stayed at 4 different resorts

The passengers were soon cleared and allowed to return home.

Later Friday afternoon, Air Transat Flight 509 — from Holguin to Toronto — landed at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. Eleven people who reported feeling ill were assessed by public health nurses.

None needed to be treated or transported to hospital.

The Public Health Agency of Canada said although many passengers reported staying at the same resort, at least four different resorts have been identified.

"The kind of illness is not uncommon but it is still important to take precautions and complete assessments," the agency said in a statement.

Man with two hearts survives double-sized attack

Courtesy of Dr. Giacomo Mugnai

The chest x-ray of an Italian man who has two hearts.

msnbc.com/ By Brian Alexander

At first there didn’t seem to be anything unusual about the man who, in 2010, reported to a Verona, Italy emergency room. He was short of breath, sweating, and had low blood pressure – cardiovascular trouble, no doubt. E.R. doctors see similar symptoms all the time.

But this man was very different indeed. He had two hearts.

“We haven’t ever seen anything similar to this case before,” Dr. Giacomo Mugnai said in an email.

It turned out that a few years earlier, the man had undergone a procedure known as a heterotopic heart transplant. Unlike an orthotopic transplant, in which one organ is removed and another put in its place, a heterotopic transplant pairs a new organ with a diseased one. More >>

'Totally drug-resistant' TB strain reported

Rafiq Maqbool  /  AP

Mohammed Shamim Sheikh, who suffers from multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, is seen through an X-ray of his chest as he listens to a social worker at his home in a slum in Mumbai on Monday.

Indian doctors have reported the country's first cases of "totally drug-resistant tuberculosis," a long-feared and virtually untreatable form of the killer lung disease.

It's not the first time highly resistant cases like this have been seen. Since 2003, patients have been documented in Italy and Iran. It has mostly been limited to impoverished areas, and has not spread widely. But experts believe there could be many undocumented cases.
No one expects the Indian TB strains to rapidly spread elsewhere. The airborne disease is mainly transmitted through close personal contact and isn't nearly as contagious as the flu. Indeed, most of the cases of this kind of TB were not from person-to-person infection but were mutations that occurred in poorly treated patients.
What's more, there's a debate within the public health community about whether to even label TB infections as totally drug resistant. The World Health Organization hasn't accepted the term and still considers the cases to be what's now called extensively drug-resistant TB, or XDR. However, Dr. Paul Nunn, a coordinator at the WHO's Stop TB Department in Geneva, said there is ample proof that these virtually untreatable cases do exist.
Student's virulent TB prompts testing of 150 classmates
The Indian hospital that saw the initial cases tested a dozen medicines and none of them worked, a pretty comprehensive assessment. A TB expert at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they do appear to be totally resistant to available drugs.
"It is concerning," said Dr. Kenneth Castro, director of the CDC's Division of Tuberculosis Elimination. "Anytime we see something like this, we better get on top of it before it becomes a more widespread problem." More >>

Arfa Karim Randhawa, the Programming prodigy passes away at 16

Dan DeLong/ This portrait of Arfa at the age of 10 accompanied my story about her in the Seattle P-I in 2005.

By Todd Bishop, GeekWire

Arfa Karim Randhawa, the computer programming prodigy who became the world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Professional at 9 years old, has passed away at the age of 16, according to reports out of her native Pakistan this weekend.

She had been in the hospital for nearly a month after reportedly suffering an epileptic seizure and cardiac arrest. Two weeks ago her outlook appeared to improve. In recent weeks, Microsoft had stepped in to help provide expert medical care.

As explained in this earlier post, I met Arfa and wrote a story about her in 2005 as a newspaper reporter covering her visit to the Microsoft campus in Redmond, when she was 10 years old. After seeing the reports this weekend, I went back and found some of the audio clips from my interview with her, including her talking about meeting Bill Gates, learning to program and what she planned to do when she grew up.

More >>

Does your happiness depend on where you sleep?

By Astrid Van Den Broek | Chatelaine 

What side of the bed do you sleep on?

Me, I’m a right-side girl, at home or when sleeping over at a friend's or family member's house. I need to score that right-hand-side because I’m also a right-side sleeper who prefers to face out of the bed rather than into it. I don’t know why but I also don’t question it—it just works.

But perhaps my right-hand status is costing me some happiness. So reports an article in The Daily Mail that says those who sleep on the left-side of the bed are happier than us right-hand-side sleepers. Wait—what?

As The Daily Mail reports, the study of 3,000 adults commissioned by U.K. hotel chain Premier Inn discovered that those who doze on the left-side are more cheerful and optimistic than their right-side counterparts. This finding made me pause and scrutinize my husband. He's by far the more optimistic half of our relationship, though I do tend to sport a healthy dose of cheeriness (which we recently rediscovered when debating what we would do as parents while watching The Road.) More >>

El visor 3D del cuerpo humano de Google vuelve como Zygote Body

Microsiervos

Google Body, la aplicación web que permitía indagar las interioridades del cuerpo humano en 3D y uno de los muchos servicios de Google que desapareció del mapa, ha vuelto renombrado como Zygote Body.
Zygote Media Group ha utilizado el código original de Google Body para construir Zygote Body, que funciona en Firefox y Chrome.
Mas >>

Yoga potentially dangerous

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Nicotine patch may help improve memory, study finds

msnbc.com/ By Linda Carroll

Nicotine may help tune up the brains of seniors suffering from mild memory loss, a new study shows.

Researchers found that seniors suffering from mild cognitive impairment, or MCI, could boost their memories with a nicotine patch, according to the study published in Neurology.

The patches also led to improvements in attention and mental processing. But these effects weren’t as strong as the impact on memory, said study co-author Dr. Paul Newhouse, a professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Cognitive Medicine at Vanderbilt Medical Center. “The take-home message for this is that nicotine may be helpful in those with early signs of memory loss,” Newhouse said.

MCI is considered to be a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease, bringing similar, though less severe, symptoms such as mild memory loss, slowed thinking and attention problems. Currently, there are no medications approved to treat those symptoms.

Experts suspect that in MCI, just as in Alzheimer’s disease, there is deterioration and death of nerve cells in the brain that make a critical chemical messenger called acetylcholine. As levels of the neurotransmitter drop, memory and other mental functions decline.  More >>

Happy Birthday Stephen Hawking: How has he survived so long?

CAMBRIDGE, England — British scientist Stephen Hawking has decoded some of the most puzzling mysteries of the universe but he has left one mystery unsolved: How he has managed to survive so long with such a crippling disease.

The physicist and cosmologist was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease when he was a 21-year-old student at Cambridge University. Most people die within a few years of the diagnosis, called motor neurone disease in the U.K. On Sunday, Hawking will turn 70.

"I don't know of anyone who's survived this long," said Ammar Al-Chalabi, director of the Motor Neurone Disease Care and Research Centre at King's College London. He does not treat Hawking and described his longevity as "extraordinary."

"It is unusual for (motor neurone disease) patients to survive for decades, but not unheard of," said Dr. Rup Tandan, a neurology professor at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. Still, Tandan said many longtime survivors had ventilators to breathe for them — which Hawking does not.

Hawking first gained attention with his 1988 book "A Brief History of Time," a simplified overview of the universe. It sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. His subsequent theories have revolutionized modern understanding of concepts like black holes and the Big Bang theory of how the universe began.

To mark his birthday Sunday, Cambridge University is holding a public symposium on "The State of the Universe," featuring talks from 27 leading scientists, including Hawking himself. For 30 years, he held a mathematics post at the university previously held by Sir Isaac Newton. Hawking retired from that position in 2009 and is now director of research at the university's Centre for Theoretical Cosmology.

Hawking achieved all that despite being nearly entirely paralyzed and in a wheelchair since 1970. He now communicates only by twitching his right cheek. Since catching pneumonia in 1985, Hawking has needed around-the-clock care and relies on a computer and voice synthesizer to speak.

More >>

Brain health, 'silent strokes' studied

CNN.com/

New findings in Alzheimer's disease support longstanding notions of what doctors have preached for years. The studies look at associations, not causes, but they further scientists' pursuit of preventing the fatal brain disease.

It's no secret that healthy diet high in omega-3 fatty acids and rich in vitamins found in fruits and vegetables is good for your overall health and longevity.

In a study released this week in the journal Neurology, scientists associate these fish-rich diets and foods with high levels of vitamins B, C, D, and E nutrients with increased cognitive performance and decreased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, or "brain shrinkage."

People who consume diets high in trans fats, primarily found in fast foods, fried and frozen foods, were more likely to have brain shrinkage and lower scores on the thinking and memory tests than people with diets low in trans fats, the study found.

This is the first study using nutrient biomarkers in the blood to look at the effect of diet on memory, thinking skills and brain volume, researchers said. Similar diet studies in the past primarily depended on participants' memory recall and questionnaires.

“These results need to be confirmed, but obviously it is very exciting to think that people could potentially stop their brains from shrinking and keep them sharp by adjusting their diet,” said study author Gene Bowman, assistant professor of neurology at the Oregon Health and Science University, in a news release from the American Academy of Neurology.  More >>

'Brain dead' student awakens hours after docs suggest pulling the plug

Liz Klimas

It’s an event being called a “modern day miracle” and the best Christmas present “ever ever ever”. Sam Schmid, a 21-year-old University of Arizona student, awoke from a coma just hours after the doctors broached the subject of taking him off life support and organ donation with his parents.

Good Morning America reports that Schmid was in a car crash in October that killed two fellow passengers, leaving him with a brain injury that had “all the odds stacked against him,” according to his neurosurgeon, Dr. Robert Spetzler. Now doctors expect Schmid to make a full recovery.

“It seems like we were being led down a path to plan for the worst and that things were not going to work out,” said John Schmid. “The miracle, to put it bluntly, was that in a matter of seven days, we went from organ donation to rehab. What a roller coaster it was.”

Watch the ABC News report including Schmid’s comments on his recovery:

More >>

American team to Cuba for baseball and med supplies

Uploaded by WOODTV8

The Lakers will be only the second team from the United States to play against a Cuban team in Cuba when they travel to the island for a four-game series.

mTor: A New Path to Longevity

Scientific American/

In 2009 scientists discovered that a drug called rapamycin could significantly extend life span in mice, doing so by interfering with the activity of a protein called mammalian TOR, or mTOR.
The finding is the most compelling evidence to date that mammalian aging can be slowed pharmaceutically, and it galvanized interest in mTOR’s role in the aging process.
The result also highlighted a mystery: Why would suppressing cellular growth and replication—oneeffect of interfering with mTOR—extend life span?
Research into that question could lead to medicines that postpone or mitigate aging-related disorders—from Alzheimer’s disease to cancer to heart failure—and perhaps even extend how long humans can live.

Canadian-developed #HIV vaccine approved for human studies

thestar.com/ By Megan Ogilvie Health Reporter

After two decades of research, a group of Canadian scientists has won approval to start testing an experimental HIV vaccine on humans.

The vaccine, developed by researchers at the University of Western Ontario, has received a green light from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for clinical human trials.

Beginning in January, the vaccine will be given to 40 healthy people with HIV to test its safety.

Dr. Chil-Yong Kang, professor of virology at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Western Ontario, called the FDA approval a “milestone.”

“We started the basic science research two decades ago,” Kang said. “The vaccine development, we started 10 years ago. This is incredible for us to get to this stage of development.”

Kang said the vaccine, called SAV001, is the first preventative HIV vaccine approved for clinical trials to use a killed whole HIV-1 virus to activate the immune response in humans.

The strategy has been used before to develop successful vaccines for influenza, polio, rabies and hepatitis A. Kang said these past successes for other viral diseases provide hope the Canadian-developed vaccine will work against HIV.

The human immunodeficiency virus used in the vaccine has been genetically altered to render it non-pathogenic, or unable to cause disease. Kang and his research team then further inactivated the virus using chemicals and radiation.

“In the past, people did not use this strategy (using a killed whole HIV virus) because people did not know how to make a safer virus and people did not know how to make large quantities of it,” Kang said. “Now we have solved those problems by the genetic engineering of the virus.”

According to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, there are 30 HIV vaccines currently being tested in phase 1 clinical trials around the world.

Many of these vaccines have largely focused on using one specific component of the human immunodeficiency virus to trigger an immune response. Other vaccines have used other viral vectors to create a vaccine. Right now, there is no effective HIV vaccine.

Dr. Jonathan Angel, president of the Canadian Association for HIV Research, whose research is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, said it is exciting that a Canadian scientist’s work has progressed from the basic research level to a vaccine approved for human clinical trials, meeting the rigorous criteria of the FDA.

But he also cautioned that developing an effective HIV vaccine remains a daunting task because HIV is a complex virus that scientists do not yet completely understand.

Should the SAV001 be proven safe, the vaccine will enter the second phase of clinical trials, in which it will be tested on 600 HIV-negative volunteers at high risk for HIV infection. Researchers will measure the volunteers’ immune response to the vaccine.

The third and final phase would enroll 6,000 HIV-negative volunteers at high risk for the disease. The participants, half of whom would be vaccinated and half un-vaccinated, would be tracked for three years to see how many in each group became infected with HIV.

Kang and his team received funding from Sumagen Canada, a company created in 2008 to support the development of the vaccine and a subsidiary of a Korean-based pharmaceutical venture company.

Is Castro Defrauding Medicare?

Capitol Hill Cubans

From The Hill:
By the time authorities busted a fake AIDS clinic in Miami, it had bilked Medicare of more than $4.5 million (2.8 million pounds). Still, the man behind the scheme remained far ahead of the agents pursuing him.

Michel De Jesus Huarte, a 40-year-old Cuban-American, hadn't simply avoided arrest. He had hatched a plan to steal millions more from Medicare by forming at least 29 other shell companies - paper-only firms with no real operations. Each time, he would keep his name out of any corporate records. Other people - some paid by Huarte, some whose identities had been stolen - would be listed in incorporation papers.

The shells functioned as a vital tool to hide the Medicare deceit - and not only for Huarte. Hundreds of others have used the veil of corporate secrecy to help steal hundreds of millions of dollars from one of the nation's largest social service program, a Reuters investigation has found [...]

To disguise Huarte's role, "straw owners" were paid as much as $200,000 to put their names on Florida incorporation records and bank accounts. In return, some straw owners agreed to "flee to Cuba to avoid law enforcement detection or capture," according to the indictment.

Grassley asks HHS to probe whether Castro regime is defrauding Medicare
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) grilled federal officials Wednesday about the Cuban government's possible ties to rampant Medicare fraud in south Florida.

Grassley asked Health and Human Services officials testifying before the Senate Finance Committee whether they were aware of any evidence that Cuba might be involved in fraud schemes against the government program.

He asked HHS Inspector General Daniel Levinson to look into any evidence that Cuban officials have been "facilitating" Medicare fraud and to get back to him after coordinating with the Justice and State departments.

Levinson said he'd "have to get back to you on the particulars."

"We wouldn't comment on any particular case in a public forum," Levinson told The Hill after the hearing.

Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services released a list of the Top 10 healthcare fraud fugitives, who have defrauded the government of $124 million combined. Seven of the 10 fugitives were of Cuban origin, and six of those are now believed to be hiding on the island.
During the hearing, Grassley referenced a report from the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami raising questions about the involvement of Fidel Castro's regime.

The report paraphrases a "high-level former intelligence official with the Cuban Government" as saying that there are "strong indications that the Cuban Government is directing some of these Medicare frauds as part of a desperate attempt to obtain hard currency."

"The source notes that the Cuban Government is also assisting (while not directing) other instances of Medicare fraud — providing perpetrators with information with which to commit fraud," wrote the report's author, research associate Vanessa Lopez. "The former Cuban official goes on to say that, in the instances where the Cuban Government is not directing or facilitating the fraud, it does provide Cuba as a place for fugitives to flee. This gives the Castro regime a convenient and care-free way to raise hard currency."

Furthermore, according to this source, "any fugitive in Cuba needs to pay astronomically large sums of money to the Cuban Government in order to enter and remain in the country."

Some Cuban-American groups have begun to ask for a congressional probe of Cuba's potential ties to Medicare fraud.

Grassley stopped short of that Wednesday, but his comments raised the level of attention a notch.

"I'm just now getting into this, so I don't really know what the next step is," Grassley told The Hill. "But at least there's one step going on now in regard to the written response that I got from [HHS]."

Tiny Biocomputers Move Closer to Reality

Scientific American Magazine/ By Tim Requarth and Greg Wayne

 

Image: Illustration by Thomas Fuchs

Researchers in nanomedicine have long dreamed of an age when molecular-scale computing devices could be embedded in our bodies to monitor health and treat diseases before they progress. The advantage of such computers, which would be made of biological materials, would lie in their ability to speak the biochemical language of life.

Several research groups have recently reported progress in this field. A team at the California Institute of Technology, writing in the journal Science, made use of DNA nanostructures called seesaw gates to construct logic circuits analogous to those used in microprocessors. Just as silicon-based components use electric current to represent 1’s and 0’s, bio-based circuits use concentrations of DNA molecules in a test tube. When new DNA strands are added to the test tube as “input,” the solution undergoes a cascade of chemical interactions to release different DNA strands as “output.” In theory, the input could be a molecular indicator of a disease, and the output could be an appropriate therapeutic molecule. A common problem in constructing a computer in a test tube is that it is hard to control which interactions among molecules occur. The brilliance of the seesaw gate is that a particular gate responds only to particular input DNA strands.  More >>