Health & Medicine
Health Watch: Pediatrician to Parents: You're Fired!
Beyond leaving their child unprotected from infections, parents who reject vaccination because of safety concerns or other reasons face an additional risk: Their pediatrician might fire them. An article in the latest Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine found that nearly 4 in 10 pediatricians would ask a family refusing all vaccinations to look for another doctor; nearly 3 in 10 said they would do so with parents who rejected even one. Most of them said they would dismiss a family, as doctors prefer to call it, even if the vaccination in question wasn't one the physician thought was important to get. Why? Because such parents no longer share their doctors' care goals or trust their judgments, said survey respondents.
But real life may not be as harsh as the survey results suggest. Erin Flanagan-Klygis, the study's lead author and a pediatrician at Rush Children's Hospital in Chicago, has run into parents who reject vaccinations--but, she says, "I never have actually dismissed a family." She'd rather talk it out.
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Health Watch: Keeping Prostate Cancer at Bay
Shed those pounds now, men. Youthful obesity could up the chance of recurrence after prostate cancer surgery. A study in last week's Clinical Cancer Research found that in men who'd had surgery, those who were obese at ages 25 or 40 or had gained considerable weight between age 25 and the diagnosis were more than twice as likely as non-obese men to have a recurrence five years later.
Previous studies showed that weight at diagnosis affects long-term outlook. Early obesity, says lead author Sara Strom, an epidemiologist at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, is "even more important."
Health Watch: Too Warm Down on the Oyster Farm
Passengers on three Alaskan cruises last summer got to ogle the glaciers--and experience up to 13 days of diarrhea. An oyster farm in Prince William Sound gave passengers free samples, and some turned out to carry a nasty bug. It was Alaska's first Vibrio parahaemolyticus outbreak--the bacteria normally live in warm waters.
The culprit, an investigative team reported in last week's New England Journal of Medicine, was global warming. The water temperature at the farm had been rising since 1997, and the oysters were harvested in especially warm months.
Health Watch: Diabetes Risk Bar
For years, the magic number for diabetes has been 100. Below 100 milligrams of sugar per deciliter of blood meant "normal." Now it looks as if risk starts climbing even below 100. In a report in this week's New England Journal of Medicine on 13,000 young male Israeli military members who were tracked for an average of almost six years, those with initial levels around 90 ran nearly twice the risk of diabetes as those between 50 and 81. Men between 95 and 99 had almost triple the risk. Says endocrinologist Ronald Arky of Harvard Medical School, who wrote a commentary: "I now tell patients, and members of my own family, several of whom have levels in the 90s, that they need to keep their weight down and start exercising."
This story appears in the October 17, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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