Health Headlines - April 5

Many Hospital Admissions Begin in Emergency Department

Hospital emergency departments are the starting point for 55 percent of the 29.3 million annual admissions to U.S. community hospitals for conditions other than pregnancy, childbirth and neonatal care, says the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

In 2003, 26 percent of all patients admitted through the emergency department had heart or blood vessel diseases, 15 percent had respiratory diseases, 14 percent had digestive disorders, and 11 percent had injuries, the report said.

Pneumonia (935,000 admissions in 2003) topped the list of 20 specific conditions for patients admitted to a hospital through the emergency department. Others at the top of the list included congestive heart failure, chest pain, hardening of the arteries, heart attack, chronic obstructive lung disease, and stroke.

The average cost of a hospital stay for a patient admitted through the emergency department was $7,400. Medicare and state Medicaid programs covered 66 percent of such admissions.

People in the Northeast were most likely to be admitted to the hospital through the emergency department, while people in the West were least likely, the report said.

Iowa Mumps Outbreak Grows

In the past week, the number of cases of mumps in Iowa has increased to at least 300 and the illness has started showing up in neighboring states as health officials try to determine the cause of the largest outbreak of mumps in the United States since 1988.

More than a third of the cases have been reported in the Dubuque area.

Fifty-five new mumps cases have been reported in Iowa within the past week alone, the Chicago Tribune reported. In recent years, the state has averaged just three cases of mumps a year.

Illinois has reported eight confirmed and seven possible cases of mumps, mostly in counties near Iowa. Two cases have been reported in Nebraska and one case in Minnesota.

Health officials are at a loss to explain the outbreak.

"We don't have any concrete answers. We expected the numbers to rise, but there is no way to predict how high the numbers will go," Meghan Harris, surveillance epidemiologist for the Iowa Department of Health, told the Tribune.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sent a team of investigators to Iowa.

As they search for answers, health officials are focusing on college campuses, where the first cases of mumps were discovered late last year. College students account for about 21 percent of the reported cases and the median age of people infected by the virus is 21, the newspaper said.

Doctors Reattach Piece of Sharon's Skull

Doctors reattached a piece of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's skull on Wednesday, a day after the operation was delayed because Sharon had a respiratory infection, Hadassah Hospital officials said.

The piece of skull had been removed during a previous operation on Sharon, who has had multiple surgeries since he suffered a debilitating stroke in early January, the Associated Press reported.

The operation to reattach the section of skull was successful and Sharon was taken back to his room in intensive care, where he has been hospitalized in a coma since his stroke.

Massachusetts to Offer Health Coverage to Nearly All Residents

A bill passed by the Massachusetts legislature Tuesday means that state will become the first to provide nearly universal health coverage. Gov. Mitt Romney has said he will sign the bill.

The bill, which uses a variety of approaches to make it possible for all the state's citizens to obtain health insurance, requires all Massachusetts residents to have health insurance by July 1, 2007, The New York Times reported.

It's estimated the plan will cover 515,000 uninsured people within three years. That's about 95 percent of people currently without health coverage. Less than 1 percent of the population will not have health insurance under the new plan.

Under the bill, government subsidies to private insurance plans will enable more of the working poor to purchase health coverage and increase the number of children eligible for free coverage, the Times reported.

People who can afford private insurance will be penalized on their state income taxes if they don't have health coverage. Businesses with more than 10 employees that don't provide health insurance will be assessed up to $295 per worker per year.

"This is probably about as close as you can get to universal," Paul B. Ginsburg, president of the nonpartisan Center for Studying Health System Change, told the Times.

"It's definitely going to be inspiring to other states about how there was this compromise. They found a way to get to a major expansion of coverage that people could agree on. For a conservative Republican, this is an individual responsibility. For a Democrat, this is government helping those that need help," Ginsburg said.

No Aspartame/Cancer Link: Study

The artificial sweetener aspartame does not increase the risk of cancer, says a U.S. National Cancer Institute study that included more than 500,000 American adults.

The findings, presented Tuesday at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, should help ease concerns about aspartame. An Italian study released last year found that aspartame appeared to increase the risk of leukemia and lymphoma cancers in female rats, the Associated Press reported.

This new study included 340,045 men and 226,945 women, ages 50 to 69. They filled out surveys in 1995 and 1996 that detailed their food and beverage consumption. Using this information, researchers calculated how much aspartame the study participants consumed.

Over five years of follow-up, 376 of the participants developed brain tumors and 2,106 developed blood-related cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma. The study authors concluded there was no link between aspartame and these cancers in general or for specific types, the AP reported.

Aspartame is used in thousands of products, including diet sodas, chewing gum, dairy products, and many medicines, the news service said.

Abstinence Emphasis for AIDS Plan Causing Problems: Report

Concerns about the emphasis on abstinence and fidelity in President George W. Bush's global AIDS plan are raised in a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The report said the plan's requirement that a large portion of funding be dedicated to abstinence and fidelity is creating confusion in many countries and hindering other HIV/AIDS prevention methods in some countries, including programs to lower rates of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, the Washington Post reported.

The Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator requires that 20 percent of all AIDS spending be used for prevention. Fifty percent of that prevention budget must be used for programs to halt sexual transmission of HIV. Two-thirds of that money has to be spent on promoting abstinence and fidelity, the newspaper said.

The requirements mean that program managers in countries receiving U.S. funding have the difficult task of balancing the needs of their local populations and the demands of U.S. officials.