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HHS Secretary Sebelius, Agriculture Secretary Vilsack Announce New Strategies To Keep America's Food Supply Safe
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced today that prevention and partnership will guide their departments" efforts to safeguard the food Americans eat every day. Both Secretaries announced new strategies that focus on prevention and depend on working closely with growers, food processors and consumers to achieve their goals.
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Potential Medical Applications For Interactive Data Eyeglasses
For car designers, secret agents in the movies and jet fighter pilots, data eyeglasses - also called head-mounted displays, or HMDs for short - are everyday objects. They transport the wearer into virtual worlds or provide the user with data from the real environment. At present these devices can only display information. "We want to make the eyeglasses bidirectional and interactive so that new areas of application can be opened up," says Dr. Michael Scholles, business unit manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS in Dresden. A group of scientists at IPMS is working on a device which incorporates eye tracking - users can influence the content presented by moving their eyes or fixing on certain points in the image. Without having to use any other devices to enter instructions, the wearer can display new content, scroll through the menu or shift picture elements. Scholles believes that the bidirectional data eyeglasses will yield advantages wherever people need to consult additional information but do not have their hands free to operate a keyboard or mouse. The Dresden-based researchers have integrated their system"s eye tracker and image reproduction on a CMOS chip. This makes the HMDs small, light, easy to manufacture and inexpensive.
News of the day
Massive Medicare Fraud Case Highlights Miami's Increased Enforcement
Eight defendants were indicted in a massive Florida Medicare fraud case. The Associated Press reports: "It may be the center for Medicare fraud, but even Miami officials said Tuesday they were surprised by the breadth of a ring they say spanned five states, used 29 fake storefronts and attempted to steal $100 million from Medicare and Medicare Advantage. Eight defendants were charged in the elaborate scam authorities say billed Medicare for bogus HIV and cancer infusion drugs using dozens of storefronts in Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana, authorities said. Two of the defendants and about $30 million are still missing." The AP notes: "It shows Miami"s stepped up health care fraud task force is working. They"ve prosecuted $1.5 billion in health care fraud cases in the past three years. Miami alone has had 146 convictions since 2007 in these cases. The fact that the suspects had to move to other states and other avenues of Medicare - in this case, Medicare Advantage - signals an understanding on the streets that officials are on to their old tricks."
Sexual Health

Menopause Transition May Cause Trouble Learning

The largest study of its kind to date shows that women may not be able to learn as well shortly before menopause compared to other stages in life. The research is published in the May 26, 2009, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. For a four-year period, researchers studied 2,362 women, who were between the ages of 42 and 52 had at least one menstrual period in the three months before the study started. The women were given three tests: verbal memory, working memory and a test that measured the speed at which they processed information. Scientists tested the women throughout four stages of the menopause transition: premenopausal (no change in menstrual periods), early perimenopausal (menstrual irregularity but no "gaps" of 3 months), late perimenopausal (having no period for three to 11 months) and postmenopausal (no period for 12 months). The study found that processing speed improved with repeated testing during premenopause, early perimenopause and postmenopause, but that scores during late perimenopause did not show the same degree of improvement. Improvements in processing speed during late perimenopause were only 28 percent as large as improvements observed in premenopause. For verbal memory performance, compared to premenopause, improvement was not as strong during early and late perimenopause. Improvements in verbal memory during early perimenopause were 29 percent as large as improvements observed in premenopause. During late perimenopause, verbal memory improvement was seven percent as large as in premenopause. Combined, these findings suggest that during the early and late perimenopause women do not learn as well as they do during other menopause transition stages. "These perimenopausal test results concur with prior self-reported memory difficulties--60 percent of women state that they have memory problems during the menopause transition," said Gail Greendale, MD, with the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. "The good news is that the effect of perimenopause on learning seems to be temporary. Our study found that the amount of learning improved back to premenopausal levels during the postmenopausal stage." The study also found that taking estrogen or progesterone hormones before menopause helped verbal memory and processing speed. In contrast, taking these hormones after the final menstrual period had a negative effect: postmenopausal women using hormones showed no improvement in either processing speed scores or verbal memory scores, unlike postmenopausal women not taking hormones. "Our results suggest that the "critical period" for estrogen or progesterone"s benefits on the brain may be prior to menopause, but the findings should be interpreted with caution," said Greendale. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Nursing Research and the NIH Office of Research on Women"s Health supported the study. The American Academy of Neurology, an association of more than 21,000 neurologists and neuroscience professionals, is dedicated to improving patient care through education and research. A neurologist is a doctor with specialized training in diagnosing, treating and managing disorders of the brain and nervous system such as multiple sclerosis, restless legs syndrome, Alzheimer"s disease, narcolepsy, and stroke. American Academy of Neurology (AAN)


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