Health Highlights: June 11, 2008

• Bottles With Bisphenol A Safe: FDA Official
• Chemical Changes May Identify Defects That Lead to Cancer
• Smoking, High BMI Increase Risk of Hearing Loss
• Virginity Pledge May Help Delay Sexual Activity
• Incentives Offered For Use of Electronic Health Records
• Airline Passengers at No Greater Risk of Infectious Disease

Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors of HealthDay:

Bottles With Bisphenol A Safe: FDA Official

Plastic baby bottles and water bottles made with a chemical called bisphenol A are safe, according to a U.S. Food and Drug Administration official.

While small amounts of bisphenol A can be released as plastics break down, the levels of exposure is safe, Dr. Norris Alderson, the FDA's associate commissioner for science, said Tuesday, the Associated Press reported.

"Although our review is ongoing, there's no reason to recommend consumers stop using products with (bisphenol A)," Alderson told a House subcommittee.

The chemical has come under intense scrutiny. In a recent draft report, the U.S. National Toxicology Program said animal studies suggest bisphenol A may cause changes in behavior and the brain, and reduce birth weight and survival in fetuses, the AP reported.

The Canadian government plans to ban bisphenol A in baby bottles, and proposed U.S. legislation would ban the chemical in children's products.

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Chemical Changes May Identify Defects That Lead to Cancer

Subtle changes in cell chemicals may help identify people at risk for cancer before they actually develop the disease, according to researchers at the U.K. Institute of Food Research.

They detected these changes in apparently normal cells taken from the intestines of bowel cancer patients, BBC News reported.

"We looked at changes in 18 genes that play a role in the very earliest stages of colorectal cancer and detected clear chemical differences in these genes in otherwise normal tissue in cancer patients," said lead researcher Professor Ian Johnson. "This represents a new way to identify defects that could eventually lead to cancer."

The study was published in the British Journal of Cancer.

While this is an interesting finding, it requires much more research, Henry Scowcroft, science information manager at Cancer Research UK, told BBC News. He noted the chemical changes detected in the normal cells could occur in response to already having cancer or to cancer treatment.

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Smoking, High BMI Increase Risk of Hearing Loss

Smoking and high body mass index (BMI) increase the risk of hearing loss, says a European study that included 4,083 people in seven countries.

The more years a person smoked, the greater their risk of high-frequency hearing loss, said the study, which also found that people with higher BMIs had more pronounced hearing loss across the frequency range tested, CBC News reported.

Interestingly, moderate alcohol consumption appeared to protect against hearing loss. The study was published online in the Journal for Research in Otolaryngology.

The researchers couldn't explain their findings, but noted that smoking and high BMI lead to cardiovascular disease, which has been linked in previous studies to hearing loss, CBC News reported. And previous research has suggested that moderate alcohol consumption may help protect the heart.

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Virginity Pledge May Help Delay Sexual Activity

A virginity pledge may help some young people postpone the start of sexual activity, according to RAND Corp. researchers who interviewed 1,461 virgins, ages 12 to 17, in 2001 and followed up with them one and three years later.

During the initial interview, about one-fourth of participants said they had made a virginity pledge. Thirty-four percent of those who made the pledge reported having sexual intercourse within three years, compared with 42 percent of those who didn't make a virginity pledge.

The findings were published online in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

"These findings do not suggest that virginity pledges should be a substitute for comprehensive sexual education programs, or that they will work for all kinds of kids. But virginity pledges may be appropriate as one component of an overall sex education effort," lead author Steven Martino, a psychologist at RAND, said in a prepared statement. RAND is a nonprofit research organization.

"Making a pledge to remain a virgin until married may provide extra motivation to adolescents who want to delay becoming sexually active," Martino said. "The act of pledging may create some social pressure or social support that helps them to follow through with their clearly stated public intention."

It's estimated that 23 percent of female adolescents and 16 of male adolescents in the United States have made a virginity pledge, the RAND statement said.

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Incentives Offered for Use of Electronic Health Records

Twelve sites across the United States will participate in a Medicare demonstration project that will offer incentives to doctors who switch to electronic health records (EHRs), Health and Human Service Secretary Mike Leavitt announced Tuesday.

Once the five-year, $150-million project is fully implemented, as many as 1,200 small- and medium-sized primary care practices will receive incentive payments in exchange for getting rid of paper records and adopting certified EHRs. The goal is to reduce errors and improve health outcomes for patients.

Total payments under the demonstration for all five years may be up to $58,000 per physician or up to $290,000 per practice.

Communities selected to work with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on the EHR demonstration project include: Alabama; Delaware; Jacksonville, Fla. (multi-county); Georgia; Maine; Louisiana; Maryland/Washington, DC; Oklahoma; Pittsburgh, Pa. (multi-county); South Dakota; Virginia; Madison, Wis. (multi-county).

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Airline Passengers at No Greater Risk of Infectious Disease

Worries about being at high risk of catching the flu or other infectious diseases while traveling on airliners may be overblown, according to an Australian Transport Safety Bureau study released Tuesday.

"The risk of transmission of infection on board an aircraft is probably no greater than, and perhaps less than, other environments where large numbers of people are gathered together," according to study conclusions cited by Agence France-Presse.

Many people mistakenly believe air in passenger planes is laden with infectious germs and viruses because it's continually recycled with limited fresh air from outside, the bureau noted.

However, the study found that if an aircraft's recirculation and filtration systems are working properly, the risk of catching an infection while flying is no greater than eating in a restaurant or traveling by bus, AFP reported.

Most people who do contract an illness on a flight are seated close to a sick passenger and exposed to droplets from coughing and sneezing, rather than from contaminated re-circulated air, the study found.