BEIJING, (Xinhua) — President of the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahd Al-Jaber Al-Sabah on Sunday called on all OCA members to support China for the successful delivery of the 2008 Olympic Games.
“It is important for Asian countries to stand behind China … as the success of the Beijing Olympics is the success of Asia,” Sheikh Ahmad told Xinhua on the sidelines of the general assembly of the Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC), which will open in Beijing on Monday.
Sheikh Ahmad also said that the Olympic Games should not be politicalized.
“Sport is sport, politics is politics. My idea is don’t bring politics to sport… They should not use sport as a tool,” he said.
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The theme heading into the NFL owners meeting is integrity. Coming off Spygate and the 49ers’ tampering penalty, commissioner Roger Goodell must make sure the game is as clean as possible.
Give Goodell credit. He’s willing to confront tough issues. Although it can be debated whether his penalty against Patriots coach Bill Belichick for the illicit taping was too light, Goodell and the NFL acted quickly once they found something illegal had occurred. Even though the evidence of 49ers tampering in a possible deal for Lance Briggs was sketchy, Goodell came down hard and took away a fifth-round choice and lowered San Francisco’s draft position in the third round.
At the owners meeting, which officially starts Monday, Goodell looks for more tools to defend his sport. On March 6, Goodell sent a memo to the competition committee to study measures to enforce rules involving the integrity of the game. The committee came back with recommendations. Goodell and the league came up with a possible solution.
Without getting into too much legalese, Goodell hopes to have the owners accept a lower standard of proof in cases involving integrity — particularly those where spying is suspected.
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By Ed Edelson
HealthDay Reporter
In 2004, Medicare reduced its reimbursement rates to doctors for drugs that treat prostate cancer by blocking the activity of male hormones.
Coincidentally or not, the use of surgery — castration — to accomplish that same goal started to increase at just the same time, a new study found.
It’s not possible to say that financial incentives had a direct influence on medical practice in the treatment of prostate cancer, said Dr. J. Stephen Jones, chairman of regional urology at the Cleveland Clinic, who led the study. “Certainly, I would not take that interpretation,” he said, citing other possible explanations, such as increased concern about the side effects of the hormone-blocking drugs.
Still, Jones added, after the reimbursement rates were cut, “our study shows, essentially Read more
By Julie Appleby, USA TODAY
The government’s bill for treating chronically ill seniors and the disabled in the nation’s teaching hospitals is nearly four times higher at some of those medical centers than others, says a report out today.
The reason? Sharp differences in how long patients spend in the hospitals during the final two years of their lives and how often they see doctors, say researchers at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.
The study comes amid rising health care costs and a report by Medicare’s trustees that the program’s hospital fund will go broke in 11 years. The report says taxpayers could save billions of dollars if hospitals practiced more efficiently.
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Thats new research on hospital treatment raises concern among parents, as it shows that medicine mix-ups, accidental overdoses, and bad drug reactions harm roughly one of 15 children while being hospitalized.
Researchers, led by Paul Sharek of Stanford University’s Packard Childrenâ€â„¢s Hospital followed over 900 children Âs cases from 12 different U.S. childrenâ€â„¢s hospitals in 2002.
The study found one in 15 hospitalized children, or more than 540,000 annually, are a subject to a drug mistake or adverse reaction. Nearly 97 percent of the identified adverse drug events resulted in mild, temporary harm mostly involving nausea and pruritis, the study said. However, only 3Ǔ percent of these events were found in traditional hospital reports.
Other findings of the study included: 22 percent of all adverse drug events were deemed preventable, 17.8 percent could have been identified earlier, and 16.8 percent could have been mitigated more effectively.
The findings highlight the need for “aggressive, evidence-based prevention strategies to decrease the substantial risk for medication-related harm to our pediatric inpatient population,†the researchers said, according to the Associated Press.
“This gives us some valuable insight into the frequency of medication-related harm. The number is larger purely because of the way we collected the information before. But most of those who work in children’s hospitals realize that because of the complexity of children’s health care in the United States harm occurs,†Sharek said.
The study has once again sparked interest in the accidental life-threatening heparin overdoses in a Los Angeles hospital, administered to Dennis Quaidâ€ââ¢s newborn twins last November.
Actually, the actor praised the new study and encouraged parents to ask questions and stay in-tune with what their kids are being given in hospital.
“Every time a caregiver comes into the room, I would check and ask the nurse what they’re giving them and why,†Quaid said quoted by the AP.
The study was published Monday in the April issue of the journal Pediatrics.
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