HEAT WAVE: Extreme weather, like the deadly heat wave in Europe in 2003, will create some of the public health impacts expected from climate change.
DURBAN, South Africa—Former entomologist Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum of the World Health Organization worries about nosebleeds more than the average person. Thats because hes one of the estimated 12 million people worldwide afflicted with leishmaniasis—a potentially fatal parasitic disease characterized most often by lesions on the skin and/or mucus membranes—caused by the bite of a sandfly.
As the team leader for climate change and health at WHO and an environmental epidemiologist, Campbell-Lendrum is also in a position to worry more about how global warming is going to affect such so-called vector-borne diseases. “Is c
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Change, Climate Change, Public Health
Gary R. Roberts, dean of the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law, says many former players have already sued the league on this issue, and many more potentially could. A hearing on Jan. 26 will involve whether some of these federal lawsuits should be consolidated.
Roberts was the official on-air legal analyst for the NFL Network with respect to the antitrust labor dispute that threatened to cancel the 2011-12 professional football season. The dispute came to an end in August when the league and union signed a new collective bargaining agreement.
Roberts, recognized as one of the foremost experts on sports law and antitrust law in the country, practiced at the firm of Covington and Burling in Washington, D.C.
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Indiana University, University
Jan. 23, 2012 — The question has been around as long as “he said/she said” has been a phrase: Basically, who is more capable of handling pain?
Though not likely to be the final word, new research shows that women may feel pain more intensely than men do, especially for specific types of pain.
Researchers mined electronic medical records from more than 11,000 men and women. They showed that across 47 diseases and painful conditions considered in the study, women said they felt significantly more pain than men in 14 of them.
As part of the studies, all participants rated their pain on zero-to-10 scales, where zero stands for “no pain” and 10 means the “worst imaginable” pain.
The difference in pain for women was most pronounced for musculoskeletal pain, such as low back pain and/or osteoarthritis. Researchers
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Pain, Pain Men
Hospitals are too loud, and patients sleep could be suffering because of it, suggests a new study.
According to World Health Organization recommendations, noise in hospital rooms generally shouldnt get above 30 to 40 decibels. But researchers at one hospital reported that the average noise level in patients rooms was close to 50 decibels, and sometimes spiked as high as 80 decibels – almost as loud as a chainsaw, they said.
The hospital environment is certainly not a restful environment, said Dr. Vineet Arora, from the University of Chicago.
In a study of about 100 adult patients at their medical center, she and her colleagues found that noise levels in patients rooms at night tended to be lower than during the day, but almost always exceeded recommendations for average and maximum noise level.
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Hospital Rooms, Sleep