NEWS:Tracking bugs: The Health Service Executive (HSE) has been urged to set up a special reference laboratory to track the incidence of different types of the deadly hospital superbug, Clostridium Difficile.
The call came from Dr Denise Drudy, a member of the Health Protection Surveillance Centre's sub committee which has been looking at developing a strategy for dealing with the infection.
The bug, which is contracted by well over 1,000 patients a year, has been described in the past by the head of the HSE, Prof Brendan Drumm, as probably "a bigger killer of people than MRSA".
The State already has an MRSA reference laboratory.
Dr Drudy told the Irish Medical News that without facilities to type strains of the bug, which a reference laboratory would provide, health authorities here are "working in the dark".
Early delivery risk: White women with low levels of total cholesterol during pregnancy are at heightened risk for pre-term delivery, new research shows.
"We were surprised by the significant, four-fold increase of premature birth among white mothers and equally surprised that this finding was not confirmed among African American mothers," study chief Dr Maximilian Muenke, from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, said.
The findings add to previous research showing that high levels of total cholesterol also raise the risk of pre-term birth, Dr Muenke and colleagues note in the October issue of the journal Pediatrics.
QUOTE:
"It is vital for clinicians to emphasise the importance of reducing television viewing in early childhood among those children with early use."
- US researcher Cynthia Minkovitz whose study found that children who watch television excessively at a young age are at greater risk of developing behavioural problems and poor social skills.