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FDA Ruling On Mercury Fillings Falls Short
In a disappointing move, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did an about face in issuing a final regulation classifying dental amalgam without calling for stringent precautions for pregnant women and children. Last June, a court settlement filed by the Consumers for Dental Choice required the FDA to withdraw claims of mercury amalgam"s safety from its Web site and issue an advisory indicating: "Dental amalgams contain mercury, which may have neurotoxic effects on the nervous systems of developing children and fetuses."

New York Doctors Race To Abide By In-Office Surgery Rules
"A New York State law that takes effect on July 14 has physicians who perform office-based surgery scrambling to upgrade their offices or find new space altogether," The New York Times reports. The Patient Protection Bill, "signed into law by Gov. Eliot Spitzer in July 2007, is intended to ensure high safety standards in offices when surgery and other invasive procedures are conducted with more than minimal sedation" and is "the first time that New York State will regulate office-based surgeries." Doctors may need to modify their office space with "larger elevators, improved ventilation, backup power equipment with the ability to run for a longer period and other mechanical accommodations." But "since some medical offices cannot be physically adapted to meet accreditation requirements, especially in Manhattan, many physicians have been seeking new office space." This can be difficult in the city, where there is "a dearth of recently built medical office space." Claire Pospisil, "a spokeswoman with the New York State Department of Health, said the state did not know how many medical offices were conducting operations; this was one reason for the new law." She estimates that "70 or 75 percent of medical offices in New York City and Long Island do these surgeries."
News of the day
Why Don't All Insurance Plans Cover Ankle Replacements When The FDA Has Approved Them?
It"s been a decade since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first total ankle-replacement system for patients with severe ankle arthritis.
Medical Devices

Better Diagnosis Of Diarrhea-Causing Bacteria: New Method Developed By Researchers From Helmholtz Center For Infection Research, Germany

It is based on detecting short, repetitive DNA segments in the genome of bacteria. Every single bacterial strain has such characteristic repeats. "With this method we are able to identify bacterial strains as well as clarify their genetic relationships. Furthermore, we can show how new pathogenic variants develop," says Manfred Hç¶fle, researcher at the HZI. The results have now been published in the current issue of the scientific journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The work is part of the two European Union funded projects "Healthy Water" and "AQUA-chip". Manfred Hç¶fle is coordinator of both projects that deal with various aspects of the microbiological safety of both, drinking water and sea water. Various bacteria that live in drinking water or sea water can cause severe human diseases. One of them are vibrios: its species Vibrio cholerae is more commonly known as the causative agent of Cholera that spread in Europe until the 20th century. Interestingly, not all Vibrio cholerae strains are pathogenic to humans. Only those strains cause severe diarrhoea known as Cholera that produce a certain bacterial toxin which attacks the intestinal wall. A less known, though also dangerous member of the genus Vibrio, is Vibrio parahaemolyticus. It is a highly contagious pathogenic germ with only a dozen ingested bacteria causing severe diarrhoea. This strain is a threat for the pacific region and reached the east coast of the United States in the 21st century. Since the end of the 1990s, Vibrio parahaemolyticus epidemics have led to thousands of cases of illness in Chile. In the future, due to ballast water or climate change, the species may also gain importance in Europe. As in the Cholera bacterium, various Vibrio parahaemolyticus strains exist with varying infectivity. Distinguishing those strains has been a challenge until now. The newly developed method makes it now possible to characterize and distinguish hundreds of bacteria strains in a short time. The method is based on the existence of short, repetitive DNA segments in the genome of all living species. As in a tandem bike, those segments are lined up on the DNA strand, called "tandem repeats". They are characteristic for every bacterial strain. To identify a certain strain, the HZI researchers use short DNA fragments, marked with certain dyes. Each dyed DNA fragment recognizes a single tandem repeat, binding at it. As a result, the researchers receive, for example, six red fragments binding a tandem of six repetitions. Then, the researchers analyzed the tandem repeats marked with dyed fragments: Every bacteria strain differs in pattern and size of the measured tandem repeats. "With this method, we are able to differentiate more then 120 Vibrio parahaemolyticus strains," says Manfred Hç¶fle. This is important for infectious diseases in which it is necessary to know which strain is the causative agent. Further information are whether it is just one or more strains and where they derive from. The latter can help to prevent spreading of the disease with corresponding sanctions. "The intake of Vibrio parahaemolytics often occurs through raw clams that have filtered contaminated sea water. With this method, we are able to say from which clam species the germ originates." The new technique can also be used to characterize other bacterial pathogens and to investigate how pathogenic bacteria evolve in the environment. "Hereby, this high resolution method makes an important contribution towards a fast and precise recognition of microbial pathogens with pandemic potential." Article: Multiple-Locus Variable-Number Tandem-Repeat Analysis for Clonal Identification of Vibrio parahaemolyticus Isolates by Using Capillary Electrophoresis. Erika Harth-Chu, Romilio T. Espejo, Richard Christen, Carlos A. Guzmç¡n, and Manfred G. Hç¶fle. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 2009; 75: 4079-4088 Dr. Bastian Dornbach Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres


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