SAN FRANCISCO — A drug-resistant strain of potentially deadly bacteria has moved beyond the borders of U.S. hospitals and is being transmitted among gay men during sex, researchers said on Monday. They said methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, is beginning to appear outside hospitals in San Francisco, Boston, New York and Los Angeles. Sexually active gay men in San Francisco are 13 times more likely to be infected than their heterosexual neighbors, the researchers reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine. ‘Once this reaches the general population, it will be truly unstoppable,’ said Binh Diep, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who led the study. ‘That’s why we’re trying to spread the message of prevention.’ According to chemical analyses, bacteria are spreading among the gay communities of San Francisco and Boston, the researchers said. ‘We think that it’s spread through sexual activity,’ Diep said. This superbug can cause life-threatening and disfiguring infections and can often only be treated with expensive, intravenous antibiotics. It killed about 19,000 Americans in 2005, most of them in hospitals, according to a report published in October in the Journal of the American Medical Association. […]
The last thing you want to hear in the emergency room when you’ve got crushing chest pain or can’t breathe is that you have to wait before you can get treatment. Unfortunately, in too many instances, that’s exactly what’s happening. In fact, new research found that waiting times in emergency rooms have increased by 36 percent for all patients, to an average of 30 minutes per patient. And the sickest sometimes have to wait the longest: As many as one-quarter of all heart attack patients had to wait 50 minutes or longer before seeing a doctor. Study author Dr. Andrew Wilper, a fellow in general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and an internist with the Cambridge Health Alliance, reports in the Jan. 15 online issue ofHealth Affairsthat the increasing wait times are the result of a ‘perfect storm’ that has occurred as emergency room visits are on the rise while many ERs are closing their doors. ‘It’s hard to ignore the fact that several hundred ERs have closed their doors, and we’ve seen an increase in the number of patients using ERs. Plus, there are a number of internal factors contributing like bottlenecks because of a […]
WASHINGTON — Communications regulators have cleared Google Inc (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) to bid in an upcoming auction of coveted wireless airwaves, according to auction documents released by the Federal Communications Commission on Monday. Google was among a list of potential bidders released by the FCC that have made a required up-front payment and have been cleared to take part in the high-stakes 700 megahertz wireless auction. The auction is scheduled to begin on January 24 and expected to raise at least $10 billion for the U.S. government from airwaves being returned by television broadcasters as they move to digital from analog signals in early 2009. As expected, the list of qualified bidders also included U.S. wireless providers AT&T Inc (T.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Vodafone Group Plc (VOD.L: Quote, Profile, Research), as well as ventures involving EchoStar Communications Corp (DISH.O: Quote, Profile, Research), Cablevision Systems Corp (CVC.N: Quote, Profile, Research), Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) co-founder Paul Allen. On a separate list of potential bidders that did not qualify for the auction was […]
Each person’s iris is as individual as their fingerprint, but with 266 identifiable features is much more detailed. Photograph: Science Photo Library Senior British police officials are talking to the FBI about an international database to hunt for major criminals and terrorists. The US-initiated programme, ‘Server in the Sky’, would take cooperation between the police forces way beyond the current faxing of fingerprints across the Atlantic. Allies in the ‘war against terror’ – the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – have formed a working group, the International Information Consortium, to plan their strategy. Biometric measurements, irises or palm prints as well as fingerprints, and other personal information are likely to be exchanged across the network. One section will feature the world’s most wanted suspects. The database could hold details of millions of criminals and suspects. The FBI is keen for the police forces of American allies to sign up to improve international security. The Home Office yesterday confirmed it was aware of Server in the Sky, as did the Metropolitan police. The plan will make groups anxious to safeguard personal privacy question how much access to UK databases is granted to foreign […]
Islam watchers blogged all weekend about news that a secret archive of ancient Islamic texts had surfaced after 60 years of suppression. Andrew Higgins’ Wall Street Journal report that the photographic record of Koranic manuscripts, supposedly destroyed during World War II but occulted by a scholar of alleged Nazi sympathies, reads like a conflation of the Da Vinci Code with Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail. The Da Vinci Code offered a silly fantasy in which Opus Dei, homicidal monks and twisted billionaires chased after proof that Christianity is a hoax. But the story of the photographic archive of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, now ensconced in a Berlin vault, is a case of life imitating truly dreadful art. It even has Nazis. ‘I hate those guys!’ as Indiana Jones said. No one is going to produce proof that Jesus Christ did not rise from the grave three days after the Crucifixion, of course. Humankind will choose to believe or not that God revealed Himself in this fashion. But Islam stands at risk of a Da Vinci Code effect, for in Islam, God’s self-revelation took the form not of the Exodus, nor the revelation at Mount Sinai, nor […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
