Social Determinants of Health

From Denis Raphael
Social Work is good for your Health is not good enoug.... we have to convince others...

http://www.oasw.org/en/membersite/pdfs/A2HeatherMaxwell&KatePowerSDOH.pdf 

Facebook, PayPal tycoon embraces sci-fi future

FILE - In this Oct. 20, 2000 file photo, PayPal Chief Executive Officer Peter Thiel, left, and founder Elon Musk, right, pose with the PayPal logo at corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. Thiel who who co-founded PayPal and gave Facebook its first big investment now wants Silicon Valley to buy into a bigger idea: the future. Thiel is backing groups that see a future when computers will communicate directly with the human brain. Seafaring pioneers will found new floating nations in the middle of the ocean. Science will conquer aging, and death will become a curable disease. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File) (Paul Sakuma - AP)

By MARCUS WOHLSEN

The Associated Press
Saturday, December 25, 2010; 4:00 PM

SAN FRANCISCO -- In the movie The Social Network, the character of Peter Thiel is played as a slick Master of the Universe, a tech industry king and kingmaker with the savvy to see that a $500,000 investment in Facebook could mint millions later.

Reality is a little more rumpled.
On a recent December night, Thiel walked, slightly stooped, across a San Francisco stage to make a pitch to an invitation-only audience of Silicon Valley luminaries - investors and innovators who had scored sometimes huge fortunes through a mix of skill, vision and risk-taking.
The billionaire PayPal co-founder didn't tell them about the next big startup. He wanted them to buy into a bigger idea: the future.

Next Year's Wars

 SLIDE SHOW

The 16 brewing conflicts to watch for in 2011.

CAPTIONS BY INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP | DECEMBER 28, 2010

Across the globe today, you'll find almost three dozen raging conflicts, from the valleys of Afghanistan to the jungles of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the streets of Kashmir. But what are the next crises that might erupt in 2011? Here are a few worrisome spots that make our list.

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Hand-Washing May Have Kept Flu at Bay

Good hygiene is simply the best protection from infectious agents, experts say

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Related MedlinePlus Page

• Germs and Hygiene

THURSDAY, Dec. 29 (HealthDay News) -- Following mothers' advice may have played a big role in averting a major health crisis.

Fears of the H1N1 flu virus reached a fever pitch last winter, with public health officials fearing a widespread outbreak caused by short supplies of the needed vaccine. But an epidemic was averted, and some health experts believe that's because more people than ever before regularly washed their hands./.../

Hand-washing in the United States has become a widespread habit, according to the American Society for Microbiology and the American Cleaning Institute. They released a study in September finding that 85 percent of people washed their hands in public restrooms in 2008, the highest levels observed since they began researching hand-washing habits in 1996.

And though there's no direct scientific evidence that hand-washing fended off H1N1 long enough for a vaccine to be developed and distributed, the head of the American Public Health Association said he believes that good hygiene very likely played a prominent role in the virus never catching fire in the United States.

2010 review: A year in brief

Recently in 2010 review

11:00 31 December 2010

2010 review

Busted well: 4.9 million

The number of barrels of crude oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico following the explosion that destroyed BP's Deepwater Horizon well. Eleven of its crew died. For three mishap-prone months the company tried, and repeatedly failed, to plug its runaway well. Meanwhile, the crude poured forth, wreaking havoc on deep-water fish, migrating baby sea turtles, and BP chief executive Tony Hayward's career./.../

Papel da dopamina no sistema de recompensa

quinta-feira, 9 de dezembro de 2010

Papel da dopamina no sistema de recompensa do cérebro ajuda a entender os problemas de compulsão associados a dependência

A selective role for dopamine in stimulus-reward learning

Mecanismos da compulsão

Uma nova descoberta sobre o papel do neurotransmissor dopamina no sistema de recompensa do cérebro poderá ajudar a compreender melhor os problemas de compulsão associados a dependência e a diversos distúrbios psiquiátricos.

O estudo, feito por cientistas das universidades de Michigan e deWashington, nos Estados Unidos, concluiu que, ao contrário do que se estimava, diferenças nos tipos de resposta a estímulos ambientais entre indivíduos podem influenciar padrões químicos no cérebro relacionados à recompensa./.../

Metbolic Syndrome

Arguments continue over the metabolic syndrome

JULY 27, 2010 | Sue Hughes

New York, NY - Years after the term metabolic syndrome was first coined, controversy continues over the validity of naming and treating this clustering of certain risk factors as a separate condition. While different organizations use different definitions, metabolic syndrome is generally defined as having any three of the following: increased waist circumference, elevated triglycerides, reduced HDL cholesterol, elevated blood pressure, or elevated fasting glucose.

But for almost as long as the metabolic syndrome has been around, disagreement over its relevance has pitted some of the diabetes community against some of those in cardiology. This came to a head in 2005 when the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) issued a statement discouraging the use of the term metabolic syndrome, and then just a few weeks later, the American Heart Association (AHA) and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) released their own statement encouraging use of the metabolic-syndrome concept. Five years later, it appears that little has changed, with arguments still raging over whether there is any point in identifying and labeling individuals with this clustering of risk factors./.../

Wikidroid: coloque uma enciclopédia no seu bolso

Preston Galla, PC World EUA

28-12-2010

Aplicativo é uma ótima forma de acessar a Wikipedia a partir de um smartphone Android}
Quer acessar a Wikipedia a partir de qualquer lugar? Então instale o Wikidroid, que coloca todo o poder da Wikipedia dentro de seu smartphone. Você terá acesso a todo o conteúdo da enciclopédia, incluindo links e imagens, e não perderá nada.O Wikidroid (gratuito no Android Market) é basicamente uma interface para a versão Web da Wikipedia. Quando você faz uma busca o aplicativo acessa a Wikipedia, encontra a informação relevante, a formata para que se ajuste bem à tela de seu smartphone e então a exibe na tela.O Wikidroid também sugere termos relacionados, reduzindo o tempo de pesquisa. É possível fazer até buscas por voz. Quando você toca na opção Search, um pequeno botão com um microfone aparece na caixa de busca, da mesma forma que na busca padrão do Google em um smartphone Android. Toque no microfone, diga o que quer buscar e o aplicativo faz o resto. A tecnologia é a mesma utilizada pela busca do Google, então funciona tão bem quanto./.../

Veggie Diet Best for Kidney Patients

By Kristina Fiore, Staff Writer, MedPage Today Published: December 26, 2010 Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco. Action Points   Explain that in patients with chronic kidney disease, a grain-based vegetarian diet may be better than a meat-based diet in terms of holding down phosphorus levels. Note that those on the grain-based diet ingested the same amount of phosphorus as those on the meat-based diet. A grain-based vegetarian diet may be better than a meat-based diet in terms of holding down phosphorus levels in patients with chronic kidney disease, according to results from a small crossover study. Even though they ingested the same amount of phosphorus, patients on the vegetarian diet had lower serum phosphorus levels as well as other markers of improved phosphorus metabolism, Sharon Moe, MD, of Indiana University in Indianapolis, and colleagues reported in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology./.../

The cultural genome

Google Books reveals traces of fame, censorship and changing languages

December 20, 2010

Source: Discover, Dec 16, 2010

[+]Harvard University researchers have been analyzing the more than 15 million books scanned by Google, which created a massive electronic library that represents 12% of all the books ever published.

As the team says, the corpus “will furnish a great cache of bones from which to reconstruct the skeleton of a new science.”

There are strong parallels to the completion of the human genome. Just as that provided an invaluable resource for biologists, Google’s corpus will allow social scientists and humanities scholars to study human culture in a rigorous way. There’s a good reason that the team is calling this field “culturomics.”

The team has tracked and stored the frequency of billions or words, or sets of words, over time. The result is a “big table” that you can download and explore at www.culturomics.org. Otherwise, you can play around with Google’s real-time browser.

The team also found that new technology permeates through our culture with growing speed. By scanning the corpus for 154 inventions created between 1800-1960, from microwave ovens to electroencephalographs, they found that more recent ones took far less time to become widely discussed.

Ref.: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1199644

Read original article

ICD-10 Ramps Up

Year in Review: ICD-10 Ramps Up

By Joyce Frieden, News Editor, MedPage Today Published: December 23, 2010 As part of the Year in Review series, MedPage Todayreporters are revisiting major news stories and following up with an analysis of the impact of the original report, as well as subsequent news generated by the initial publication. Here's what's happened on the ICD-10 front since we published the first 2010 piece on the topic. Earlier this year, officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) declared that Oct. 1, 2013 would be the firm implementation date for ICD-10, the newest iteration of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding system used on medical claim forms. The question then became how to handle the transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10, especially when it came to updating each set of codes during the transition./.../

TReND: Tobacco Research Network on Disparities

Site directed by the AMICOR Catherine Coleman

The public web portal of the Tobacco Research Network on Disparities (TReND) provides researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and advocates with resources that support efforts to eliminate tobacco-related health disparities.

The Tobacco Research Network on Disparities (TReND) was created by the National Cancer Institute and the Legacy Foundation to help understand and eliminate health disparities related to tobacco.

Progressive commercialization of American medicine

by Lucas Restrepo, MD

There is only one fundamental problem with American medicine: its progressive commercialization.

Every other problem derives from it centrifugally. Medicine, wroteWilliam Osler, is “a calling, not a business.” Patients are not clients, nor physicians businessmen. People do not spend over a decade studying medicine ―living years in poverty or overburdened with debt― merely hoping to get rich. While it is perfectly legitimate to expect a salary that enables a dignified living and financial stability, any medical student who dreams a life of luxury is misguided. Even doctors or nurses in private practice rarely consider their call a conduit to personal wealth. People become health care providers for many reasons that can’t be encompassed with a neat word; however, altruism can’t be absent from anybody’s list./.../

World Heart Federation Season's Greetings

Variability in the Measurement of Hospital-wide Mortality Rates

David M. Shahian, M.D., Robert E. Wolf, M.Sc., Lisa I. Iezzoni, M.D., Leslie Kirle, M.P.H., and Sharon-Lise T. Normand, Ph.D.

N Engl J Med 2010; 363:2530-2539December 23, 2010

Abstract

Article

References

Hospital-performance metrics are increasingly used for value-based purchasing and public reporting. For example, Section 3001 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act mandates incentive payments to hospitals that meet quality performance standards, which remain unspecified.

In 2008, the Massachusetts Health Care Quality and Cost Council1 directed the Division of Health Care Finance and Policy (DHCFP) to study various approaches to estimating hospital-wide mortality rates as performance metrics. Medicare released hospital-wide mortality rates for its beneficiaries beginning in 1986 but suspended publication of the rates in 1993 because of methodologic concerns.2,3 The United Kingdom, various European countries, and Canada currently publish variants of such metrics, but questions remain regarding their clinical rationale, their usefulness for informing consumers and practitioners, and statistical methods for calculating them.4-6

In response to the council's mandate, the DHCFP initiated systematic evaluations of various methods for calculating hospital-wide mortality rates.7 At the DHCFP's request, we studied four such commercial methods./.../

melhoria da qualidade de vida em assentamentos

Pesquisa inédita aponta melhoria da qualidade de vida em assentamentos

por Secom em 22/12/2010 18:20hs

Os resultados preliminares da primeira pesquisa sobre a qualidade de vida nos assentamentos da reforma agrária de todo País foram divulgados, na última terça-feira (21), pelo Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária (Incra). Os primeiros resultados do estudo, intitulado Pesquisa Sobre Qualidade de Vida, Produção e Renda nos Assentamentos do Brasil, têm índice de confiança de 95%.

Com o objetivo de captar informações sobre quem são, como vivem, o que produzem e como produzem, e o que pensam as famílias assentadas da reforma agrária, os dados obtidos darão suporte ao planejamento de políticas públicas voltadas ao desenvolvimento da reforma agrária nos próximos anos.

A pesquisa foi realizada entre os meses de janeiro e outubro deste ano e abrangeu as 804.867 famílias assentadas entre 1985 e 2008, com a aplicação de 16.153 entrevistas, distribuídas em 1.164 assentamentos por todo o Brasil, sob coordenação do Incra, com a consultoria de pesquisadores das Universidades Federais do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) e de Pelotas (UFPel)

Qualidade de vida - Sobre a percepção da melhoria nas condições de vida dentre as famílias assentadas, após o acesso a terra, 73,5% disseram que a situação está melhor em relação à moradia, 64,86% dizem ter melhorado em relação à alimentação, 63,29% em relação à educação, 63,09% em relação à renda e 47,28% afirmam que a situação melhorou no que diz respeito à saúde/.../