The bad news: Though cervical cancer can be prevented, many women don't get the screening that could save their lives. Twelve thousand women still get cervical cancer every year, and black women are way overrepresented in this number.
The good news: We know its cause (HPV), and we know how to prevent it.
Heart & Soul magazine talked to Tamika Felder,?who was diagnosed with cervical cancer at age 25 and underwent a radical hysterectomy. Now 10 years cancer-free, she's an advocate for the prevention of cervical cancer, and her Tamika & Friends, Inc. Gift of Giving Program aids women who have fallen on financial hardship following treatment.
Felder shared some of the hard facts about cervical cancer and black women:
Black women develop cervical cancer 50% more often than non-Hispanic White women.
Black women tend to have poorer, 5-year survival rates and die more often of cervical cancer than any other race.
Of the number of Black women diagnosed with cervical cancer each year, over 40% will die.
Getting tested for HPV and knowing your cervical cancer status might not be the most festive celebration of National Women?s Health Week, but it could be a lifesaving one. Spread the word.
Read more at Heart & Soul.
In other news: AIDS Breakthrough? Study Reveals New Info on HIV Drugs.
That the lethal Hendra virus could jump from Australia?s flying foxes to its humans might seem like nothing more than bad luck ? an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of contact with animals.
Instead, it seems that people are partly responsible for the outbreak. Flying foxes are vectors, but human alteration of their ecology may have changed how Hendra moves through the animals.
By making flying-fox populations sedentary, stressed and fragmented, development might have also made them prone to viral spikes. Hendra?s spread in people may be, in a sense, a man-made disaster.
?We?re now seeing more evidence that human-induced environmental changes may be driving this disease,? said Raina Plowright, a disease ecologist at Pennsylvania State University. ?That?s something that?s been proposed many times, but few people have been able to show a mechanism. Here?s a mechanism.?
Plowright is the lead author of a study of the Hendra virus May 11 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. In September 1994, the virus killed 14 horses and their trainer in a suburb of Brisbane.
Thirteen more outbreaks have occurred since then, each involving transmission from a flying fox to a horse; of those, five resulted in transmission from horse to human. Fortunately, Hendra doesn?t seem to spread between people, but it?s still scary enough to merit Biosafety level 4 treatment. When researchers study it, they do so wearing moon suits, in high-security labs sealed with multiple airlocks.
?Why has the Hendra virus emerged now, when it has circulated for millions of years? This has been a great mystery.?
Hendra?s emergence made flying foxes ? the common name for the world?s largest bats, a fruit- and pollen-eating genus found throughout Asia and Australia ? the latest animal source of human disease, a fact that in itself wasn?t particularly novel: From plague to malaria to HIV to influenza, so-called zoonoses are historically common.
But with industrialization making it easier than ever for them to spread, new diseases are in many ways more threatening than ever before. They also seem to be emerging with increasing frequency, a phenomenon that may simply result from better modern surveillance techniques, but might also reflect a changing disease environment.
?Why has the Hendra virus emerged now, when it has circulated for millions of years? This has been a great mystery,? said Plowright. ?How does the virus move at the landscape scale? How do the ecological changes we?re observing change the dynamics of the virus ? where it spreads, how fast it spreads??
In the new study, Plowright and colleagues created computer models of Hendra-virus transmission in flying foxes. They used data from years of research on real-world epidemiology, experimental flying-fox infections, field observations of population structure and demography, and life histories. Together, all this allowed the researchers to simulate how Hendra ebbed and flowed in flying foxes and they were able to study how changes to populations altered virus circulation patterns.
In the researchers' model, Hendra virus infection spiked in urban flying foxes. Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Models are not proof in themselves, but the results were compelling. Outbreaks in flying foxes occurred in the same simulated seasons and patterns as outbreaks in real-world human cases, suggesting a resonance between model and reality. Most strikingly, large outbreaks occurred infrequently in rural populations of flying foxes; it was in urban and suburban animals ? those most likely to encounter humans ? that disease levels jumped.
Many of Australia?s flying foxes have moved into such areas, driven by destruction of rural habitat and the year-round availability of food from exotic plants, said Plowright. Many of those traditionally migratory animals no longer migrate. As a result, the model suggests Hendra virus no longer circulates evenly in Australia?s flying foxes, but misses some clusters; without low-level exposures to calibrate their immune systems, those animals? immunity disappears. When Hendra returns, it explodes.
?We?ve essentially created a situation in which flying foxes are more likely to undergo these massive epidemics that lead to spillover events,? said disease ecologist Richard Ostfeld of the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies, who wasn?t involved in the study. ?In the flying foxes, it doesn?t appear to cause terrible sickness. It may have co-evolved with them to be relatively benign. But all bets are off when the virus reaches a spillover host.?
Just as stressed humans are more vulnerable to infection, so are flying foxes.
?We?ve essentially created a situation in which flying foxes are more likely to undergo these massive epidemics that lead to spillover events.?
Asked whether the findings implied that flying foxes ought to be exterminated, Plowright said that would be impractical, unethical and potentially disastrous, because the animals pollinate many of Australia?s trees.
Instead, the results highlight the importance of conservation. Parts of New South Wales that provide winter homes for still-migratory flying foxes are threatened by development; if those are not protected, even more animals will be driven into year-round urban living.
The implications don?t end with Australia?s borders. Outbreaks of Nipah virus ? an equally lethal relative of the Hendra virus, also transmitted by flying foxes but capable of passing between humans ? now occur regularly in parts of southeast Asia. ?It spills over every year and has the potential to go pandemic,? said animal disease expert Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and co-author of the new study.
?People say things like, ?A healthy environment is good for our health? or, ?damaging the environment makes us sick.? Those are platitudes in that there?s no specificity,? said Ostfeld. ?We haven?t known to what extent those platitudes represent anything real. But now we?re applying rigorous concepts from evolution, epidemiology and immunology? to studying this.
?What we?re finding repeatedly is specific mechanisms by which human impacts on the environment increase disease transmission,? Ostfeld added.
?Hopefully we can predict this, and then we can stop it,? said Daszak. ?And we stop it by changing what we do on the planet.?
A 2008 diagram of the web of relationships implicated in Hendra virus outbreaks. Raina Plowright
Citation: ?Urban habituation, ecological connectivity and epidemic dampening: the emergence of Hendra virus from flying foxes (Pteropus spp.).? By Raina K. Plowright, Patrick Foley, Hume E. Field, Andy P. Dobson, Janet E. Foley, Peggy Eby and Peter Daszak. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, published online, May 11, 2011.
Six Things Hospitals Need to Know About Replacing Pagers With Smartphones
Paging: The End of an Era
Pagers have been an essential part of healthcare communications for a long time due to their ability to provide reliable communications at a low cost. When pagers emerged on the healthcare scene, they fundamentally changed the way doctors, nurses, and administrators could be notified that a critical message or anxious patient awaited them. Carrying a pager or ?beeper? became a status symbol. Then slowly, the technology began to offer new capabilities, such as two-way information exchange. Throughout, pagers ensured message delivery in accordance with industry requirements. In most cases, they promised a cost-effective solution and featured onsite and wide-area options so the right people could be reached at all times. Life was good.
But then the ugly truth began to emerge. IT teams saw escalating costs due to the need for backup equipment. They wasted hours configuring devices and trying to verify whether messages were sent and received when doctors reported they did not see a particular communication. The lack of an audit trail for messages led to accountability issues. Pagers were assigned to individuals but never used (or lost), eating away at thin hospital IT budgets for unnecessary equipment and services.
And then there was the aging infrastructure: paging terminals and transmitters on life support themselves that began to have questionable reliability and failures. Repairs led to extended downtime as IT teams struggled to repair old equipment. Additionally, coverage for wide-area pagers started to go downhill as paging companies? retired towers in concert with shrinking revenues. A lot of people started crossing their fingers and living with reduced performance. Going forward, pagers will still have a place in hospital communications. But there is now a better solution that allows a large percentage of the user population of doctors, nurses, and administrators to consolidate to a single device. In fact, chances are good that these devices are already commonplace at your hospital.
Enter the Smartphone Dragon
Seemingly out of nowhere, smartphones such as the iPhone?, BlackBerry?, Android?, and others have burst onto the communications scene with a vengeance. Physicians, nurses, and administrators love them. Medical students receive them upon entry to school. Even 10-year-olds carry them around. They?re superphones, merging the power of a cell phone with the capabilities of computers.
Unlike pagers before them, these devices transcend social and job-related boundaries. They?re the communications device for the masses?and seemingly every physician. More importantly, they?re everywhere. ?Hospitals are no exception. According to Manhattan Research, an estimated 63 percent of physicians currently use smartphones, with that number expected to reach 81 percent by 2012. ?With the unmatched capabilities of smartphones?not just in person-to-person communications, but also in data retrieval for anything from drug interactions to receiving EKG results?their popularity is understandable.
Users in hospitals are passionate about these devices and now request all communications, including code calls, to be sent to their smartphone. They wish to shed their tool belt of onsite and wide-area pagers and cell phones, preferring to simplify their lives and communications with a single, all-encompassing smartphone. ?Although the clinical and administrative communities at many hospitals seem to be leading a grassroots campaign to ubiquitously adopt smartphones, IT teams have legitimate concerns. With so many brands of phones and service providers, how can protocols and devices be managed? What about reliability of message delivery?
Making the decision to replace pagers with smartphones is certainly a weighty consideration. Lives are at stake. The technology has to ensure speedy delivery of the message. Every time, no exceptions. Following are important items to evaluate as you determine the right path for your organization.
1. Smartphone use is exploding exponentially in hospitals and this trend is not going away
The fact is, smartphones are here to stay, and their users are highly loyal. Many physicians and other hospital staff members carry smartphones in addition to their onsite or wide-area pagers. However, they?re eager to consolidate to a single device and no longer wish to deal with pagers. It is important for IT teams to evaluate their options for incorporating smartphones into their communications strategy for all messages, including non-urgent updates and critical codes. Ultimately, a staff that is satisfied with their communications technology is one that will stick around. Attempts to ignore the growing smartphone trend will likely be futile.
2. SMS (text) via a smartphone service provider?s Web site is not suitable for mission-critical communications
If you?re using a smartphone service provider?s Web site to send time-sensitive communications, your patient care may be suffering. For one, you likely have to visit multiple Web sites when a critical message needs to be deployed to cover the various plans spanning your user group. This wastes a lot of time and can be prone to error because people are often switching from one provider to another. Messages sent from service providers? sites are also ?fire and forget,? meaning you have no centralized audit trail of communications to track message delivery, receipt, and response. Likewise, the built-in logic you have in place for escalating a message to the next most appropriate person cannot be carried out in the event the primary contact is unavailable. Overall, having backend communications systems that do not integrate means your process is rife with inefficiency and cause for serious concern.
3. An integrated messaging system is essential, especially when it comes to SMS
One positive of most paging systems today is that they are integrated with contact center solutions such as operator consoles to facilitate code calls and other staff communications. When evaluating a move to smartphones and SMS, a system that ties in seamlessly to your existing or planned communications infrastructure is essential. Any messaging system that operates on a stand-alone basis and does not ?talk? with related applications means that the process will become lengthened and more prone to errors that jeopardize patient safety. For today?s messaging systems to truly work in an environment where clinicians and other staff members are highly mobile, you need to bring your contact center?s operator consoles, Web-based (or speechbased) employee directory, and on-call scheduling systems into harmony. A messaging system sitting in isolation is excess baggage for your IT team and hampers smooth information flow when it comes to effective staff communications using SMS.
4. The world of smartphones is heterogeneous ? it?s impossible to just support one brand
Everyone has an opinion about which smartphone works best. Likewise, new smartphones are becoming available all the time, meaning the most popular one today may not be in vogue two years from now. Assuming your staff carries several brands of smartphones, the technology you put in place on the backend needs to be capable of supporting the diverse needs and devices of your user community. It also has to be able to accomplish this without causing extra strain on your IT staff. Additional IT considerations include the ability of smartphones to leverage wireless local-area networks (WLANs) down the road.
5. Smartphone applications should offer an improved audit trail
Intelligent smartphone applications are capable of providing an audit trail that includes a log of messages sent, received, and read. This is crucial to comply with Joint Commission requirements. These logs are a safety net to prove what happened and when?especially who was contacted. Unlike most pagers, smartphones also allow users to respond with their availability. Messages can be sent back that confirm a smartphone has received the message, the message has been read, and the message has been acknowledged by the recipient. All of this is captured in an audit trail to ensure accountability.
6. Redundancy and escalation are critical
There is no getting around the fact that messages sent in hospitals absolutely must reach their intended recipients instantaneously. A code STEMI message has to reach the right team members to minimize the doorto-balloon time for the patient. This means IT teams have to establish multiple paths to get messages through to recipients in the event that high communications traffic is straining bandwidth or coverage dead spots occur. Establishing redundant communication paths through overlapping access points helps ensure smartphone communications reach the right person. In addition to an attention to infrastructure, the ?if, then? business rules of your hospital should be incorporated so that messages are automatically escalated to the appropriate person if the initial contact cannot be reached on either a primary or secondary device.
Conclusion
Today?s smartphones are truly changing the way everyone communicates. They have made inroads into hospitals worldwide as the device of choice for many physicians, nurses, and administrators. Effective use of smartphones should simplify messaging not only for staff members, but also for the IT teams who support them. Smartphones also offer benefits over pagers in the ways they can be extended in medical situations beyond person-to-person critical messaging. They can be used for workflow activities such as receiving lab results, initiating notifications, managing schedules, managing alarms from clinical and security systems, performing client-to-client messaging, and providing information look-ups. In the end, patient care and safety will be heightened by more efficient staff communications, and the staffs themselves will be more satisfied with their jobs. As you consider making the switch from pagers to smartphones, make sure you evaluate how your strategy encompasses each of these six items. This will help you create a rock-solid messaging foundation for your organization.
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If you are looking for more information on Mobile Event Notification Middleware, Nursecall System Integration, Alarm Management Integration, Paging Infrastructure, Paging Devices, Wireless Alarm Systems or Wireless Paging Systems visit: imsbundle.com. Integrated Messaging Solutions (IMS) are leaders in providing solutions for businesses looking to enable communication between mobile devices and legacy or modern technology.
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Car hire giant Avis has launched a brand new luxury chauffeur driven limo hire service for customers travelling in India.
A number of locations in the country will offer the premier limo service including Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. The new Avis chauffeur service will offer customers the chance to be chauffeur driven in a top quality Mercedes E Class limo so they can enjoy a relaxing and comfortable ride whether they?re visiting India for business or leisure purposes.
The chauffeur driven Mercedes E Class service is available in two different packages including half day and full day packages. Avis believe the chauffeur driven car hire service will be popular with those looking to enjoy sightseeing or city tours in India, airport transfers, or those needing top quality transport to a corporate or business event.
The car hire giant say the chauffeur driven service will also allow customers on short visits to India to manage their time better as clients can be collected directly from the airport and taken onto their meeting, event or hotel, making the most of their time in the country.
All of the chauffeurs employed by Avis are highly trained and reliable so as to ensure all customers receive a very high standard of customer care.
Avis has also introduced a number of special offers on its new service so customers can experience the luxurious chauffeur service at a very competitive rate.
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Having a fancy garage door is not something you would wish to forego, is it? Well, appropriate garage doors make your property seem high class and well equipped but at the same time, they can cost you a lot. Also, it is an investment that is not going to return you anything in monetary terms. So, isn't it better to build your own garage door? You could probably go for a single door if you have a requirement of one car storage, or larger door if you have to park more than one vehicle. Building your own garage door can allow you to customize it without really costing you much. One thing you will need to understand is that although building your garage door is going to consume some time from your daily routine but it is letting you enjoy the profit which the company would have earned if you had gone to buy the garage door.
The basic requirements for the process of building to initiate are probably a sharp enough saw, lumber, overhead garage door hangers, some bolts, washers, a good amount of wood glue and plywood.
Assuming you have fetched all this material, let's start off now. Your existing garage door would provide you the measurements of your new garage door. In case, you are building these doors for the very first time and have no garage doors in use before, then you would have to do a bit of hard work. You will have to get the standard sizes of the garage door of one car garage or two-car garage depending upon your requirement. Once you have that, try visualizing if that would be enough for you depending upon the height and width of your vehicle. You could probably leave some inches on either side just to be on the safe side. If you have any old garage doors, you could probably measure them and add some height and width to the original measurements. In case, you still problems, you could refer to any assistance website.
Next, you are to know what style of garage door you want. Some companies do offer garage doors which are designed according to the customers wills. You can get a bit smart here. Try utilizing this service of the companies and get all the help you need in deciding. Once you are done and your plan related to size and color including the texture and material is finalized, you can ask for a quote from the company. However, now you are to skip over the quote and use all those ideas to build your own garage door.
Moreover, you are to determine how your door panels are to be divided. Usually the 2 into 4s are good fine. You could probably use any type of treated and protected wood. Now, cut the inserts that would be forming your garage door panels. Moving on, form a groove for your door panels so that they can slip into them. Now, the time has come to use the wood glue you bought. Apply it on the sides of the panels before you slip them inside the grooves. Lastly, install the motor of your garage door and all the other mechanisms that are involves. You are to get them from a home improvement store or you probably purchase it online. The instructions are given in a manual that comes with the motor mechanisms. Simple follow them and program your garage door opener as well. Now, this process can't be elaborated on as each type of motor mechanism has its own process and steps. So trust the manual that comes with the motor and follow it carefully. So here you are with your home built garage door in almost half the price which you would have to pay to a company. >
Car hire giant Avis has launched a brand new luxury chauffeur driven limo hire service for customers travelling in India.