WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration is adopting a landmark national strategy to fight Alzheimer’s disease, with an ambitious goal of finding some effective treatments by 2025.

For families suffering today, the first National Alzheimer’s Plan offers some help too. Starting Tuesday, families can turn to a one-stop website, www.alzheimers.gov , for easy-to-understand information about where to get help. Doctors also will get a chance to receive training on how to better care for people with Alzheimer’s.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (seh-BEEL’-yuhs) called those first steps “the cornerstones” of a historic effort to fight Alzheimer’s disease.

Already, more than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s, a number that could more than double by 2050 as the population ages. Beyond the human toll, the disease is budget-busting for Medicare and Medicaid.

(HealthDay News) — Nodding off may be okay while you’re
chaperoning a kiddy movie or at your mother-in-law’s birthday party, but
not when you’re behind the wheel.

The National Sleep Foundation says these warning signs mean you’re too
tired to drive:

• Having difficulty focusing, heavy eyelids or frequent blinking.
• Daydreaming or wandering thoughts.
• Missing traffic signs or exits, or inability to remember the last few
  miles that you drove.
• Rubbing your eyes, yawning, or difficulty holding your head up.
• Drifting in and out of lanes, driving over a rumble strip, or riding
  too close to the car in front.

Copyright © 2012 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain faces a worsening shortages of medicines because vital supplies are being sucked out of the country by exporters who can sell them for higher prices elsewhere, lawmakers said.

The All-Party Pharmacy Group (APPG) said on Tuesday the government needed to consider ways to curb this so-called parallel trade, allowed under European Union rules and which can distort the distribution of prescription drugs.

Action by drug manufacturers to try to solve the problem by introducing quotas for drugs in a bid to stop exports has made the situation worse.

Parallel trade is also a headache for countries such as Greece where the government has slashed prices for certain medicines by up to a quarter as part of its austerity drive, leading to increased exports.

In the case of Britain, exports have been encouraged by a weak pound, making the country a cheap place for middlemen to source supplies – in contrast to a few years ago when prices were relatively high and drugs were imported.

APPG chairman Kevin Barron said there was scope within European legislation for the government to exempt certain goods from free movement if there was a threat to public health, and his group called for government consideration of this.

“The problem of medicines shortages is an extremely serious one, and our report shows clearly that patients are suffering harm as a result of not being able to get crucial medicines.

“We have had this problem now for over four years, and the government has intervened to mitigate shortages on a number of occasions, with no effect. In fact, the problem is getting worse, not better,” Barron said.

PATIENTS HOSPITALISED

After taking evidence for six months, the APPG said it had heard from patients with serious conditions such as epilepsy, schizophrenia and diabetes who had not been able to get drugs when they needed them. In some cases, people had been hospitalized as a result of medicine shortages.

Other countries, including France, are now investigating the possibility of prohibiting the export of medicines. Barron said “this government needs to urgently look at what they can learn from this”.

The APPG also said Britain’s healthcare regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, should do more to address supply problems and consider limiting the growth in drug wholesaler licenses.

While the vast majority of medicines dispensed in Britain come from a few big players like Celesio and Alliance Boots, there are some 1,800 licensed wholesalers engaged in small-scale supply and parallel trade.

The widespread practice of parallel trading in medicines has long been a bone of contention for big drug companies like AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer.

Industry critics also say the presence of thousands of small wholesalers across Europe makes it more difficult to stamp out trade in counterfeit drugs.

(Editing by Dan Lalor)

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain faces a worsening shortages of medicines because vital supplies are being sucked out of the country by exporters who can sell them for higher prices elsewhere, MPs said.

The All-Party Pharmacy Group (APPG) said on Tuesday the government needed to consider ways to curb this so-called parallel trade, allowed under European Union rules and which can distort the distribution of prescription drugs.

Action by drug manufacturers to try to solve the problem by introducing quotas for drugs in a bid to stop exports has made the situation worse.

Parallel trade is also a headache for countries such as Greece where the government has slashed prices for certain medicines by up to a quarter as part of its austerity drive, leading to increased exports.

In the case of Britain, exports have been encouraged by a weak pound, making the country a cheap place for middlemen to source supplies – in contrast to a few years ago when prices were relatively high and drugs were imported.

APPG chairman Kevin Barron said there was scope within European legislation for the government to exempt certain goods from free movement if there was a threat to public health, and his group called for government consideration of this.

“The problem of medicines shortages is an extremely serious one, and our report shows clearly that patients are suffering harm as a result of not being able to get crucial medicines.

“We have had this problem now for over four years, and the government has intervened to mitigate shortages on a number of occasions, with no effect. In fact, the problem is getting worse, not better,” Barron said.

PATIENTS HOSPITALISED

After taking evidence for six months, the APPG said it had heard from patients with serious conditions such as epilepsy, schizophrenia and diabetes who had not been able to get drugs when they needed them. In some cases, people had been hospitalised as a result of medicine shortages.

Other countries, including France, are now investigating the possibility of prohibiting the export of medicines. Barron said “this government needs to urgently look at what they can learn from this”.

The APPG also said Britain’s healthcare regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, should do more to address supply problems and consider limiting the growth in drug wholesaler licences.

While the vast majority of medicines dispensed in Britain come from a few big players like Celesio and Alliance Boots, there are some 1,800 licensed wholesalers engaged in small-scale supply and parallel trade.

The widespread practice of parallel trading in medicines has long been a bone of contention for big drug companies like AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer.

Industry critics also say the presence of thousands of small wholesalers across Europe makes it more difficult to stamp out trade in counterfeit drugs.

(Editing by Dan Lalor)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The number of kids treated in emergency rooms after swallowing batteries — or lodging them in their noses and ears — has almost doubled over the past 20 years, a new study suggests.

Most of those ER trips are due to button batteries, coin-shaped batteries that have become ubiquitous in toys, remote controls and hearing aids and represent a shiny temptation to curious toddlers.

Those batteries carry extra risks, experts said, because if kids swallow them, they can become lodged in the esophagus and start an electrical current flowing through the tissue — without kids showing any signs of immediate injury.

“If a child swallows a button battery, the parent might not see it happen and the child might not have symptoms initially — and the clock is ticking,” said Dr. Gary Smith, head of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio and one of the authors on the new study.

“We’ve seen children in less than two hours have severe, severe injuries from button batteries getting caught in the esophagus,” he told Reuters Health.

Using a nationally-representative sample of about 100 U.S. hospitals with 24-hour ERs, Smith and his colleagues calculated that more than 65,000 kids under age 18 had a battery-related ER visit between 1990 and 2009.

The rate of those injuries almost doubled during the study period — from about four kids for every 100,000 U.S. children each year, to between seven and eight per 100,000.

That’s probably due to more and more household electronics, hearing aids and toys using button batteries, rather than the cylindrical AAAs and AAs. The research team reported Monday in Pediatrics that more than 80 percent of all battery-related ER visits involved button batteries — most of which were swallowed by kids under five.

“They’re shiny, they’re small, and children explore things developmentally with their mouth — if they don’t know what something is, they put it in their mouth,” said Dr. Nicholas Slamon, a pediatrician who has treated battery-related injuries at Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Delaware.

There are a few ways button batteries can cause injury, according to Slamon, who wasn’t involved in the new research. They can lodge or wedge in the esophagus and push on its walls, or they can leak acid if the casing around the battery is eroded.

But the most common fear with button batteries, researchers said, is that they can create an electrical current flowing through tissue and burn a hole in the trachea or the esophagus — even if the batteries don’t have enough juice to power a remote control anymore.

Slamon told Reuters Health he and his colleagues see several kids a year who need emergency surgery to retrieve a battery from the throat, or the nose or ear.

But only a small number of visits require such serious intervention. Data from the current study showed that 92 percent of kids who came to the ER were treated there and then home.

Another new study, also from researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, found that over a similar 20-year time period, about two out of every 10,000 babies and toddlers went to the ER every year for injuries related to bottles, pacifiers and sippy cups — mostly due to falls while kids were walking or running with those products.

That’s still lower than the number of young kids who suffer injuries related to cribs and household cleaning products, for example, according to researchers led by Sarah Keim.

But most parents are aware of the need to put poisonous cleaning products out of reach, for example.

BE “DILIGENT”

Susan Sadaskus of Powell, Ohio, said she read all the information on how to baby-proof her house, setting up gates and covering outlets.

But it was just before Thanksgiving 2010 that she learned firsthand about one risk no one had warned her about, Sadaskus said.

While her 15-month-old son, Max, was playing on the living room floor, she noticed a piece of plastic she didn’t recognize, and later found the stereo remote nearby, missing its battery casing.

“We’d never used the remote, so we weren’t sure if there was a battery in it,” said Sadaskus, who also said that until then, her son hadn’t been prone to put foreign things in his mouth.

So it wasn’t until dinner, when Max couldn’t keep down any food or milk, that she and her husband decided to take him to their local ER — “to err on the side of caution.”

It was at the ER that doctors found the remote battery lodged at the top of her son’s esophagus. Max was transferred via ambulance to Nationwide Children’s and rushed into surgery to remove the battery.

At that point, the battery had been in Max’s esophagus for a little over two hours, Sadaskus said. Surgeons weren’t sure if they got the battery out early enough to prevent damage — but a year and a half later, Max doesn’t suffer any complications.

“The issue with this remote was the battery compartment was not secure — there was not a screw on this battery compartment,” Sadaskus said.

Since then, she and her husband have gotten rid of all remotes in the house, and throw away any singing greeting cards their son has gotten — which also contain button batteries and can be easily ripped open.

“We really are diligent in making sure those button batteries are not in our house, or if they are in our house, they’re secure.”

Experts agreed that parents should make sure all compartments on battery cases are screwed in, if possible, or that they’re securely taped shut.

And if parents are discarding a dead battery, it should be thrown out in a container, in the bottom of the trash where kids are unlikely to go fishing for it, Slamon said.

“The real way to prevent these (emergencies) is to prevent the event from happening in the first place,” Smith said.

But, he added, “If (parents) suspect something, they need to get to the hospital and get an X-ray done immediately.”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/jsoh2P Pediatrics, online May 14, 2012.