Man Brought Back To Life After Being Clinically Dead For 40 Minutes

39-year old Colin Fielder from Victoria, Australia was clinically dead for 40 minutes—that is until a new resuscitation technique from The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne brought him back to life, according to Herald Sun.

The new technique is one of two being performed by the hospital. They have already resuscitated three patients who were clinically dead—including Melbourne—with deaths spanning from 40 minutes to an hour.

The hospital is experimenting with a mechanical CPR machine which executes continual chest compressions. They are also experimenting with a portable heart-lung machine, most commonly used in theater, which maintains blood and oxygen flow to the brain and vital organs.

The Auto Pulse Machine and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation have been used to treat seven patients so far.

The treatments allow doctors to figure out the cause of the heart attack, treat it, and maintain blood and oxygen flow. This decreases the risk for permanent disability. All three patients that were revived returned home without disability.

The treatment calls for three doctors trained in intensive-care and all the machinery being ready to go on site, said Bernard, which is not available at any other hospital in Victoria.

Pandemic

Courtesy Of The BBC

A simple virus brewed in the belly of a dead bird is set to embark on a global killing spree. The likely culprit is H5N1 - a bird flu virus with the dangerous potential to mutate into the next pandemic flu virus.

In a feature-length special, we tell the story of what could happen if a flu pandemic hits. Experts predict the next pandemic will be more disruptive than any disease we've seen before. And they're particularly worried that it will be most deadly for the young and otherwise healthy.

The last flu pandemic in 1918 killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. Nowadays, with extensive global travel and movement, the virus will be able to spread even more easily. The estimates are that hundreds of millions could be infected and potentially die.

First Antibiotic-Resistant Gonorrhea Cases Detected In North America

Gonorrhea infects close to 700,000 Americans each year.

Completely Incurable Gonorrhea May Be At Hand

JASON KOEBLER reports,

The fears of major health organizations have come true: Gonorrhea that is immune to the last remaining effective oral antibiotic has been detected in at least nine North American patients, meaning the era of "incurable" gonorrhea could be close.

In a study released Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a group of scientists led by Vanessa Allen of Public Health Ontario, found that 6.7 percent of patients with gonorrhea at a Toronto clinic still had the disease after a round of cephalosporins, the last effective oral antibiotic used to treat the disease. Of 133 patients who returned for a "test of cure" visit, nine remained gonorrhea-positive. This is the first time cephalosporin-resistant gonorrhea has been found in humans in North America.

Last year, both the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control warned that untreatable gonorrhea—the world's second most common sexually transmitted infection—could soon be a reality as the bacteria showed increasing resistance to cephalosporins in lab tests.

"These are the clinical cases we've been waiting for," Allen says. "This is the translation of the lab information into what the clinical consequence is."

Previously, there had been a couple individual case reports of untreatable gonorrhea cases in the United Kingdom, Austria, France, Norway, and Japan. In an accompanying editorial, Robert Kirkcaldy of the CDC writes that gonorrhea is quickly becoming a more threatening disease.

"Cephalosporin treatment failures have now been documented in North America," he writes. "Although this milestone was expected, its arrival is deeply troubling."

Gonorrhea is estimated to infect close to 700,000 Americans each year. Symptoms include painful urination, abdominal pain, genital discharge, itching, and infertility in women. Women who have both HIV and gonorrhea are more likely to pass HIV to their offspring than women with just HIV.

Less than a year ago, Gail Bolan, director of the CDC's sexually transmitted disease prevention program, wrote that the "threat of untreatable gonorrhea is emerging rapidly." At the time, just 1.7 percent of gonorrhea isolated in the lab were considered resistant to cephalosporins. Allen says her study shows just how fast antibiotic resistance is evolving in the organisms.

"Our results aren't generalizable to the overall concentration because they all came from one clinic," she says. "But basically, the problem appears worse than we originally thought."

Although each of the nine patients in Canada were cured with the injectable antibiotic known as ceftriaxone, Allen warns that there's been "a parallel increase" in resistance to that antibiotic.

"I think without a doubt this will become a bigger problem," Allen says. "The next threat is when, not if, the same thing happens with ceftriaxone. And then what?"

According to Kirkcaldy, "clinicians now face the emergence of cephalosporin-resistant [gonorrhea] without well-studied, effective backup treatment options."

Via: "US News"

FDA OK’s Ingestible Sensor Chip

Proteus Digital Health, Inc. announced Monday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared its ingestible sensor for marketing as a medical device.

The ingestible sensor (formally referred to as the Ingestion Event Marker or IEM) is part of the Proteus digital health feedback system, an integrated, end-to-end personal health management system designed to help improve patients’ health habits and connections to caregivers.

“The FDA validation represents a major milestone in digital medicine,” said Dr. Eric Topol, professor of genomics at The Scripps Research Institute and author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Healthcare. Directly digitizing pills, for the first time, in conjunction with our wireless infrastructure, may prove to be the new standard for influencing medication adherence and significantly aid chronic disease management,”

The Proteus ingestible sensor can be integrated into an inert pill or other ingested products, such as pharmaceuticals. Once the ingestible sensor reaches the stomach, it is powered by contact with stomach fluid and communicates a unique signal that determines identity and timing of ingestion.

This information is transferred through the user’s body tissue to a patch worn on the skin that detects the signal and marks the precise time an ingestible sensor has been taken. Additional physiologic and behavioral metrics collected by the patch include heart rate, body position and activity.

The patch relays information to a mobile phone application. With the patient’s consent, the information is accessible by caregivers and clinicians, helping individuals to develop and sustain healthy habits, families to make better health choices, and clinicians to provide more effective, data-driven care.

Via: "Kurzweil AI"

The RoboDoctor Will Virtually See You Now

 iRobot announced its Healthcare Robotics division in 2009.

RP-VITA stands for "Remote Presence Virtual + Independent Telemedicine Assistant." Beyond simply providing a doctor with the ability to directly interact with patients from just about anywhere in the world, here's a brief rundown on what makes the RP-VITA unique among other telepresence platforms, straight from the press release:

• An enhanced navigation capability that enables the RP-VITA to better manage driving and navigation elements so the health care professional can put more focus on patient care tasks. State‐of‐the-art mapping and Obstacle Detection Obstacle Avoidance (ODOA) technologies allow safe, fast, and highly flexible navigation in a clinical environment.
• An additional capability for the RP-VITA incorporates autonomous navigation and is being submitted to the FDA for 510(k) clearance. This capability will allow a remote clinician or bedside nurse to send the RP-VITA to a target destination with a single click, enabling a number of breakthrough clinical applications. InTouch Health anticipates clearance for this feature in Q4 2012.
• Real-time access to important clinical data, enabling a range of new workflow improvements for physicians, nurses and other patient care team members. For example, the RP-VITA can be integrated with live patient data from the electronic medical record and is equipped with the ability to connect with diagnostic devices such as otoscopes and ultrasound. It comes equipped with the latest electronic stethoscope.
• A new, simple to use iPad1 user interface will enable quick and easy navigation to anywhere the RP-VITA needs to go, as well as interaction with the patient, family and care team.

InTouch, it's important to note, already has a fairly sophisticated telemedicine platform: the RP-7. InTouch knows what it's like to intermix robots with doctors and patients in a hospital environment, but there's more to this than just functionality: as a medical device controlled by a doctor who may be making critical care decisions, the robot itself has to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And that's just for telepresence: RP-VITA still has to go through a separate certification process to allow it to navigate autonomously in places where having a software or hardware issue could have immediate consequences to patients, and to make this work, Ava's original sensor suite has been optimized for performance in a hospital environment, giving the robot the ability to spot things like IV lines and glass doors. This "point and go" style of navigation, where a doctor can just click somewhere on a map of the hospital and the robot will get itself there safely, makes the RP-VITA uniquely user-friendly.




To make a remote doctor as effective as possible, the RP-VITA allows all kinds ofClass II medical devices to be plugged directly into the robot, which will stream data back to the physician in real time. A digital stethoscope is built right in, but you can also plug in (for example) an ultrasound machine, and the doctor will be able to see streaming video. Also, to the extent that the hospital has digitized medical records, all of that information can be made available through the RP-VITA interface as well. 


Looking farther ahead, iRobot wants to expand the hybrid autonomous telepresence capabilities of this platform to tasks like business telepresence and industrial security. The former will be an interesting category for iRobot to tackle: there are already a fair number of players in that space (including Vgo, Anybots, and Suitable Technologies, to name just a few), and it's been hard for anybody to really get a foothold. If iRobot can leverage RP-VITA's skill at autonomous navigation in dynamic environments, there could certainly be some potential there, and we'll be watching closely over the next six months to a year to see how this new telemedicine platform ultimately plays out.


Via: "Spectum"

Imagine

Posted by Guest Blogger "Sayf Maslul"

Yes, imagine - a country that takes hundreds of thousands of its young men and women, puts them in harm’s way for the benefit of a small elite, doesn’t provide them with an economy that can absorb them when they’ve completed their service, doesn’t provide them with adequate healthcare, doesn’t deal with the emotional and physical costs of the violence it asks them to unleash and suffer, and thinks not a whit about the people on whom that violence is exercised.

Imagine if the US as a whole behaved even more like its military. Or, moving to the seemingly opposite end of the spectrum, think if American corporations all followed the example of Apple, today among the most profitable and powerful corporations in the world, which even as its profits have soared has squeezed its suppliers to charge even less for the products and labour they provide, and in so doing ensure that hundreds of thousands of poor workers in China continue to work for ludicrously low wages in suicide-inducing jobs all so that more Americans can buy iPhones or iPads for $5 less than they’d otherwise pay.
Mark LeVine - How do you judge a State of the Union speech that begins with a lie? [Al-Jazeera, English]