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Senate HELP Panel Begins Mark Up Of Bill Placing Tobacco Under FDA Oversight
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Tuesday began marking up a bill (S 982) that would allow FDA to regulate tobacco products, CongressDaily reports. The bill would allow FDA to place larger, color warning labels about the health risks of smoking on cigarette packs, as well as to regulate the marketing of tobacco products and advertising to children. The agency could not ban tobacco products or eliminate nicotine from cigarettes, but it could regulate their production and ban flavored cigarettes other than menthol. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) said, "Over the years, this bill has been reviewed; it has been vetted; it has been debated, over and over and over again. The time has come to act." The House in April passed its version of the bill, 298-112 (Hunt, CongressDaily, 5/20). The committee by voice vote approved an amendment proposed by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) that would give FDA priority to review products that contain nicotine, such as candies. Committee ranking member Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) proposed two amendments, one that would have given regulatory authority over tobacco to CDC and another that would have ordered FDA to study which flavors to ban, instead of a current provision that bans specific flavors. Both amendments were defeated. Enzi said, "I think the FDA is the wrong regulator. It approves cures, not poisons." The only Democrat who opposed the bill was Sen. Kay Hagan (N.C.), who said the measure would harm the tobacco industry in her home state (Armstrong, CQ HealthBeat, 5/19). The panel"s other member from North Carolina, Sen. Richard Burr (R), said he would filibuster the bill. He said, "I put my fellow senators on notice: This is something that will be a much longer time on the floor than it will be in this hearing" (CongressDaily, 5/20). The committee plans to continue marking up the bill Wednesday and possibly Thursday.The Obama administration has expressed its support for the bill (CQ HealthBeat, 5/19). FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg also has said her agency should regulate tobacco (Armstrong, CQ HealthBeat, 5/18).
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Siemens Hearing Instruments Launches Education Initiative For Schools During Deaf Awareness Week
Siemens Hearing Instruments has kicked off its new education initiative during Deaf Awareness Week with a visit by its hearing ambassador Kellie Moody to a Birmingham based deaf school. The visit and the launch of an education focused website ties into this year"s Deaf Awareness theme of "look at me".
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ACOG Issues New Guidelines On Fetal Monitoring To Resolve Inconsistencies In Interpretation
The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology recently published new guidelines on electronic fetal monitoring in an attempt to increase consistency in the way physicians interpret and act on the results, the New York Times reports. Electronic fetal monitoring, which was introduced in the 1970s, is used during labor for more than 85% of the four million infants born alive in the U.S. annually, the Times reports. According to the Times, use of fetal monitors became standard obstetrical practice before it was known if the benefits outweighed the risks. The new guidelines refine the meaning of various readings from fetal monitors and could help doctors make better decisions about whether to intervene during labor.According to experts, the widespread adoption of fetal monitoring has produced both negative and positive consequences, including significant increases in caesarean deliveries and the use of forceps during vaginal deliveries. Monitoring has not been found to reduce the risk of either cerebral palsy or fetal death resulting from inadequate oxygen to the fetal brain, as it was intended to do. Furthermore, lawyers commonly use monitoring results to support malpractice cases that might have little merit, which in turn has driven rising malpractice insurance costs and prompted some obstetricians to stop delivering infants.The new guidelines divide monitor readings into three categories to help doctors interpret readings more consistently. The old guidelines had two categories -- reassuring and non-reassuring -- and it was up to the obstetrician to determine whether a non-reassuring reading required intervention. Under the new guidelines, the first category applies when tracings of the fetal heart rate are normal and no specific action is required. The second category is for indeterminate tracings that require evaluation, continuous surveillance and re-evaluation. Obstetricians treating patients in this category should consider other clinical factors that could affect the fetus and whether the patient could be safely moved to category one, according to Catherine Spong of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which produced recommendations on which the guidelines are based. The final category is for abnormal tracings that require immediate evaluation and efforts to reverse the abnormal heart rate. The Times reports that more refinements to the guidelines are expected to be released in 2010 (Brody, New York Times, 7/7).
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International Study Links 3 Genes To Melanoma

A consortium of European and Australian scientists doing a genome-wide association study found three gene variants were strongly linked to melanoma risk: two of them had previously been linked to pigmentation, freckling and sun sensitivity, and one was a new discovery. The findings may explain why people with the most moles on their skin have the highest risk of melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer. The study was led by Professors Julia Newton Bishop and Tim Bishop of the Melanoma Genetics Consortium (GenoMEL) at the University of Leeds and is published in the 5 July online issue of Nature Genetics. For the study, they examined the genetic make up of more than 10,000 people, which meant looking at over 300,000 variants or "snips" (SNPs, single nuclotide polymorphisms) comparing those of people with melanoma to those who did not have the disease. They found a number of clear, genetic patterns. Every year about 48,000 people worldwide die of melanoma, a disease responsible for most deaths from skin cancer. Many scientists suggest that the increase in melanomas in recent decades is partly due to the emergency of package holidays where people who don"t get a lot of sun most of the year suddenly expose themselves to a lot of it for one or two weeks. They say intermittent, rather than daily exposure to the sun over longer periods puts people at higher risk of melanoma. Also, it has already been shown that people who burn easily, have fair skin and red hair are most at risk of melanoma. The researchers found that the people in this study who had been diagnosed with melanoma were also more likely to be carrying genes that gave them red hair and freckles. Tim Bishop, of the Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine and the Cancer Research UK Centre at Leeds said this what they expected to find, but the links appeared much stronger than they anticipated. "We had known for some time that people with many moles are at increased risk of melanoma," he said. He and his colleagues found clear links between some genes on chromosomes 9 and 22 and increased risk of melanoma, but, as he explained: "These genes were not associated with skin colour." In fact, what they found, when they teamed up with colleagues at King"s College London and in Brisbane, Australia, who had been counting moles on twins, was that: "These genes actually influenced the number of moles a person has," said Bishop. However, we still don"t know much about how sunshine and genetics come together to cause cancer in some people, he added, explaining that: "If you take the people who have the greatest exposure to sunlight -- those who work outside for example -- and compare them to those with the least exposure, their risks of getting skin cancer are actually quite similar. Statistically, the differences are quite negligible." Bishop said what they did know was that the people most likely to develop melanoma were those with a particular combination of genes and a lifestyle of significant sun exposure. Bishop and colleagues suggest there are five genes that influence melanoma risk and that a person with all five variants is about 8 times more likely to develop melonoma than a person with none, although most of us have at least one. Cancer Research UK"s director of health information, Sara Hiom, said: "The more we can understand malignant melanoma through research like this the closer we should get to controlling what is an often fatal cancer." She said Bishop and colleagues had confirmed what Cancer Research UK, through its SunSmart campaign already advised: that people with lots of moles, and people with red hair and fair skin, are at higher risk of getting melanoma, and should take extra care in the sun. However, she added that: "The research goes further and identifies the actual genes associated with this increased risk." "Genome-wide association study identifies three loci associated with melanoma risk." D Timothy Bishop, Florence Demenais, Mark M Iles, Mark Harland, John C Taylor, Eve Corda, Juliette Randerson-Moor, Joanne F Aitken, Marie- Francoise Avril, Esther Azizi, Bert Bakker, Giovanna Bianchi-Scarrç , Brigitte Bressac-de Paillerets, Donato Calista, Lisa A Cannon-Albright, Thomas Chin-A-Woeng, Tadeusz De ogonbniak, Gilli Galore-Haskel, Paola Ghiorzo, Ivo Gut, Johan Hansson, Marko Hoc caronevar, Veronica Hç¶iom, John L Hopper, Christian Ingvar, Peter A Kanetsky, Richard F Kefford, Maria Teresa Landi, Julie Lang, Jan Lubin acuteski, Rona Mackie, Josep Malvehy, Graham J Mann, Nicholas G Martin, Grant W Montgomery, Frans A van Nieuwpoort, Srdjan Novakovic, Hç¥kan Olsson, Susana Puig, Marjan Weiss, Wilbert van Workum, Diana Zelenika, Kevin M Brown, Alisa M Goldstein, Elizabeth M Gillanders, Anne Boland, Pilar Galan, David E Elder, Nelleke A Gruis, Nicholas K Hayward, G Mark Lathrop, Jennifer H Barrett & Julia A Newton Bishop. Nature Genetics, Published online: 05 July 2009 doi:10.1038/ng.411 Additional University of Leeds. Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD Copyright: Medical News Today Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today


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