Major Cancer Groups Recommend CT Scans for Lung Cancer

Hemera/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- For the first time, several top cancer organizations are recommending that smokers and former smokers ages 55 to 74 years who have smoked at least one pack of cigarettes a day for at least 30 years get an annual low-dose CT (LDCT)—a three dimensional X-ray—to look for lung cancer.

The recommendations, put forth as a collaborative effort by the American Cancer Society, American College of Chest Physicians, American Society of Clinical Oncology, and National Comprehensive Cancer Network, were released Sunday morning. They appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Each year, more Americans die from lung cancer than from breast, colon, and prostate cancers combined. It has held its position for years as the second most common cancer for both sexes in the United States. Only prostate cancer is more common than lung cancer in men. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women.

If detected early enough, lung cancer can be treated and survival chances improved. Despite this, until now there had been no formal recommendations on screening tests for this deadly cancer.

“We now have an important and critical tool to screen for the most common cancer in America, and can reduce the mortality through this screening,” said Dr. John Deeken, assistant professor in the division of hematology/oncology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Still, the question of whether every person at high risk for lung cancer should get an annual low-dose CT scan is not so simple. Since the type of CT scan used exposes the patient to radiation, albeit a low-level dose, there is a small health risk posed by this screening.

If doctors detect a questionable cancerous mass through a CT scan, they may have to evaluate it further through a minor surgery called a biopsy. In this procedure, a doctor will take a sample of the tissue for further testing to determine if the mass really is a cancer. While some of these may be cancerous, there are always a certain number which are not—meaning that the detection and subsequent surgery may not have been technically necessary.

The new recommendation also begs the question of who will be paying for the test itself.

“The cost of LDCT is currently not covered as a standard test,” said Dr. Chao Huang, lung cancer specialist at the University of Kansas Cancer Center. “Therefore, it is difficult to recommend this test when patients may be burdened by the cost of this test year after year.”

“The key question is when will more insurance companies, and most importantly Medicare, start paying for these screening tests,” Deeken said.

And then there is the issue of how many Americans will fall under the guidelines—and whether the resources exist to screen all of them.

“We currently do not have the infrastructure to manage the potential number of patients that would qualify for screening,” Huang said.

These issues aside, one thing is clear: screening CTs have been shown to save lives. Dr. Keith Mortman, associate professor of clinical surgery at Georgetown University School of Medicine, explains that a major study in 2010 called the National Lung Screening Trial found a 20 percent reduction in lung cancer deaths in patients who were screened with low-dose CT scans as compared to those who got chest X-rays.

Dr. Herbert Kressel, a radiologist at Harvard Medical School, says that in light of this, the recommendation is a step in the right direction.

“Lung cancer is an important health problem with a poor prognosis when it is discovered at an advanced stage,” Kressel said. “This study is important in further highlighting the importance of low dose CT screening for patients at high risk for lung cancer.”

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

Listeria Scare Prompts Salad Recall

iStockphotoThinkstock(NEW YORK) -- Fresh concerns over possible Listeria contamination has prompted producer River Ranch Fresh Foods to issue a voluntary nation-wide recall for its bagged salad.

The bacteria Listeria monocytogenes can cause serious, potentially fatal infections in children, the elderly and others with weakened immune systems. A 28-state outbreak in 2011—one of the deadliest on record—claimed 30 lives with 146 confirmed cases of the illness.

Routine random tests conducted by the Food & Drug Administration revealed the potential for contamination. Affected products are packaged under the brand names of River Ranch, Farm Stand, Hy-Vee, Marketside, Shurfresh, and The Farmer’s Market.

In healthy adults, the bacteria can cause flu-like symptoms including fever, severe headache, stiffness, nausea, abdominal pain and diarrhea.

Thus far, no one has been reported sick in connection with any potentially contaminated salad, according to the company’s official press release.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

CDC Recommends Baby Boomers Get Tested for Hepatitis C

Comstock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that baby boomers--Americans born between 1945 and 1965-- get tested for Hepatitis C, Health Day reports.

The agency said that most cases of the disease occur in this age group, and most were infected with it during their teens and 20s, and don't know they are infected. Baby boomers reportedly have a rate of infection five times higher than others because the cause of hepatitis C was only discovered in 1989, years after they were young adults.

In 2007, 15,000 people died from the virus, according to CDC data.

If hepatitis C is not detected and treated, it could potentially cause cirrhosis of the liver or liver cancer.

The number of new hepatitis C infections has declined from several hundred thousand per year to around 17,000, which is attributed to public education and improved infection control in hospitals.

The CDC said it's thought that 800,000 people living with hepatitis C could be identified and over 120,000 hepatitis C-related deaths prevented by targeting baby boomers, according to Health Day.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

Former Police Officer Claims Zoloft Made Him "Unconscious" During Attack

iStockphoto/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- A former police officer accused of kidnapping and raping a 25-year-old waitress in 2010 will be allowed to use the Zoloft defense, a California judge ruled Thursday, claiming he was mentally "unconscious" during the attack because of the antidepressant.

Anthony Nicholas Orban is accused of abducting the woman at gunpoint and making her drive to a storage facility before the attack, the Los Angeles Times reported. If convicted, he could face life in prison.

"But for the use of Zoloft, Mr. Orban would not have committed these acts," Orban's attorney James Blatt told the Times. "Here you have a police officer and former Marine who for the last 10 years has been dedicated to protecting his country and protecting his community. ... This was totally out of character."

A spokesman for Pfizer, the company that makes Zoloft, said in a statement: "There is extensive science supporting the safety and efficacy of Zoloft, and the medicine carries accurate, science-based and FDA-approved information on its benefits and risks."

The drug does carry warnings to call a health care provider if users begin "acting aggressive or violent" or "acting on dangerous impulses."

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

Antibiotics Illegal in the US Found in Samples of Foreign Shrimp

iStockphoto/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- With Americans eating more shrimp -- more than 1 billion pounds a year or 4 pounds per person -- than salmon, crab and trout combined, the crustacean seems to be the U.S.'s favorite seafood.

"It's all over the menu," said New Orleans chef Brian Landry of the seafood restaurant Borgne. "The shrimper men hit the dock yesterday morning. By 3 p.m. the shrimp were in our kitchen."

Landry uses only local gulf shrimp, but most Americans don't know that 90 percent of the shrimp they purchase at the grocery store -- and in most restaurants -- never see a shrimper or even a fishing boat.

Most of the fresh shrimp eaten in the United States is raised in small, overcrowded pens on shrimp farms in countries like India, Thailand and Vietnam, according to the federal government. And too often, the shrimp is raised in shockingly disgusting conditions that promote disease.

"A shrimp that's farm-raised in a foreign country to produce the yield they need and the quantity they need, they'll use any means necessary that we don't use here," Landry said.

To keep the shrimp from dying in diseased waters from their own muck, some shrimp farmers routinely pour antibiotics that are not allowed in the U.S. into their pens -- and some of it is reaching U.S. grocery stores.

Because there is so much shrimp flooding the system, though, the Food and Drug Administration currently inspects no more than 2 percent of it. The government says it pressures the foreign shrimp industry to police itself and ramps up inspection on producers who have been caught using banned chemicals.

"Probably 1 [percent] to 2 percent of the products coming in actually get manually inspected," said FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg. "We can't screen every container that comes in, open every box, so what we are doing is [trying] to apply the smartest and best strategy to this, which is a risk-analytic approach."

"It's a system that is producing good results," said Michael Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods at the FDA. "People can be confident that there's a system in place that does an effective job of minimizing these residues. It's not perfect. There's room for improvement. We're doing a number of things to be able to do that but we think people can have confidence in the safety of seafood."

The FDA says that despite its zero tolerance policy on antibiotics, an occasional antibiotic-contaminated shrimp is not a danger to consumers.

To find out just how much contaminated shrimp was reaching U.S. grocery stores, 30 samples of fresh shrimp were purchased across the country. Those samples were then sent to the nationally recognized Institute of Environmental and Human Health food lab at Texas Tech University and tested for potentially dangerous antibiotics. Shrimp in three of the 30 samples were found to contain banned antibiotics.

"About 10 percent of them showed evidence of pharmaceutical residue in the muscle tissue alone, which people eat," said Dr. Ronald Kendall, a professor of environmental toxicology and the institute's director.

Three different banned antibiotics were found in the shrimp: enrofloxacin, an antibiotic banned in animals that Americans eat because it damages the immune system; chloramphenicol, suspected to cause cancer in humans; and carcinogen nitrofuranzone, which was banned in the U.S. 40 years ago.

Kendall said the detection limit for FDA-approved seafood for nitrofurazone -- which can have potential health consequences when ingested or absorbed -- was about one part per billion.

"With imported shrimp from international destinations, if you exceed one part per billion, that shipment will probably be terminated," Kendall said. "In the case of the two sample systems that we received from New York when the shrimp averaged 28 and 29 parts per billion, this considerably exceeded the policy."

But the FDA's Taylor said that a small sample size -- in this case, the 30 samples tested at Texas Tech -- did not give a complete picture of residues in food.

"We do much more sampling than that," he said. "We have an understanding of these residues that says they are not generally very unusual. We typically do not have illegal residues. When we have them, we take strong action to prevent that product from coming into the country."

Patty Lovera of Food and Water Watch said U.S. consumers should ask for wild-caught, not farm-raised shrimp. Wild-caught shrimp can run a dollar a pound more but they swim freely and are not held in small pens.

Gavin Gibbons, spokesman for the National Fisheries Institute, a trade group that represents domestic and foreign shrimpers, said companies found skirting the FDA systems -- including their home countries -- could be barred from exporting to the U.S. He said that he didn't think more testing was the answer to the problem though.

"Focusing on certain countries or companies is a better use of resources that just testing everything that moves," he said. "We want the FDA to focus their resources on the country or company that abuses the system."

Gibbons said that his organization was "disappointed" with Texas Tech's findings and that it maintained a zero-tolerance policy for unapproved antibiotics.

"Our member companies do their own sampling and testing at different times both in the exporting countries and here in the U.S.," Gibbons said. "Additionally, many invest in third-party certification programs that review food-safety provisions throughout the value chain."

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

Georgia Woman with Flesh-Eating Disease to Lose Hands, Right Foot

ABC News(AUGUSTA, Ga.) -- Aimee Copeland, the Georgia student who lost her leg to a rare flesh-eating infection two weeks ago, shed no tears after learning she would lose her remaining foot and both hands, according to her family. Her reaction instead: "Let's do this."

The 24-year-old remains in intensive care at an Augusta hospital, still battling the effects of the May 1 zip line accident that cut open her calf and invited the life-threatening infection. Her breathing tube has been replaced by a tracheostomy, a tube inserted directly into her wind pipe.

Despite showing signs of recovery, Copeland's hands and right foot will be amputated to prevent the infection from spreading to her blood, according to her father.

"As they usually do, the doctors were presenting us with a medical no-brainer," he wrote in a blog dedicated to her recovery Thursday. "We had to do what is necessary to save Aimee's life."

It's unclear whether the amputations have already occurred. A spokeswoman at Doctors Hospital in Augusta deferred questions to Andy Copeland's blog.

Before learning about the amputations, Copeland learned about the kayaking trip on the Little Tallapoosa River, the fall from a homemade zip line, and the wound that wouldn't heal -- events blurred by drugs designed to keep her calm in intensive care. She also learned about the flood of support and well-wishes.

"We told her that the world loved and admired her. We explained that she had become a symbol of hope, love and faith," Andy Copeland wrote. "Aimee's eyes widened and her jaw dropped. She was amazed."

Fears that Copeland would react to the news of her amputations with "horror and depression" quickly faded as she nodded acceptingly and asked about prosthetics.

"We all understood her next three words," Andy Copeland wrote. "Let's do this."

Copeland's upbeat reaction to the devastating news brought her father to tears.

"I wasn't crying because Aimee was going to lose her hands and foot, I was crying because in all my 53 years of existence, I have never seen such a strong display of courage," he wrote. "I was crying because I am a proud father of an incredibly courageous young lady."

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

Surprise! Men, Meat and Masculinity Linked

Comstock/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) -- There’s no summer activity manlier than slapping a thick steak on the grill and chowing down, according to a new study.

The report published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that people associate meat with masculinity, a fact that may make healthier, vegetable-heavy diets seem wimpy and unappealing.

“To the strong, traditional, macho, bicep-flexing, All-American male, red meat is a strong, traditional, macho, bicep-flexing, all-American food,” the authors wrote. “Soy is not. To eat it, they would have to give up a food they saw as strong and powerful like themselves for a food they saw as weak and wimpy.”

Researchers conducted a series of studies testing metaphors associated with food. They found that people from Western cultures typically link manliness with meat, especially meatier muscle like steak. They also found that people associated meat with more masculine words and that meat-eaters are considered manlier than those who steer clear of or don’t dine on swine or cattle.

Interestingly, the researchers found that meat was associated with the male gender in 23 languages that assign gender to certain words.

Maybe the association comes from thoughts of strength and power in the muscle that meat comes from, the researchers speculated, or maybe it comes from thoughts of macho activities like hunting. Whatever the case, the study suggested that men seem to feel uneasy about picking a Portobello mushroom over a pork chop.

The health risks associated with meat-heavy diets are becoming increasingly evident. One study found that eating a single serving of red meat every day was linked to an increased risk of early death.

Dr. Ulka Agarwal, chief medical officer for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a non-profit group that promotes preventive medicine, animal rights and plant-based diets, said the “meat is macho, veggies are lame” mindset is really an outdated way of thinking about eating.

“The face of plant-based diets is changing as they become more mainstream,” Agarwal said. “It’s not just hippies, but also professional athletes who are following plant-based diets now.”

PCRM is already working on promoting the pros of plant-eating to men. The group that was behind controversial billboards in Chicago proclaiming that “hot dogs cause butt cancer” now promotes a program featuring masculine celebrities such as NBA players, firefighters  and ultra marathoners discussing the benefits of eating a plant-based diet and how it helps them perform.

Agarwal said an easy way to start on a plant-based diet is to avoid eating meat for one day a week.

“Easing people into these changes can really help them develop a taste for plant-based foods,” she said.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

Swearing Characters More Popular, Attractive in Young Adult Novels

Zoonar/Thinkstock(PROVO, Utah) -- Profanity in teen novels varies greatly from book to book, but characters that do use foul language tend to also be the most popular, attractive and rich, according to new research published in the journal Mass Communication and Society.

Sarah Coyne, professor in the department of family life at Brigham Young University, analyzed the use of profanity in 40 young adult books on the adolescent bestsellers list.

Thirty-five out of the 40 books had at least one swear word. She found that YA novels contained on average 38 instances of bad language, but one book had nearly 500 instances of swearing.

Of note, the characters that were doing the swearing tended to be of higher social status, better looking and have more money than their non-swearing counterparts.

"The funny thing about books is that you really don't know what you're getting into when you pick one up," said Coyne. "I was genuinely surprised by how much profanity some of these books had."

The documented increase in the use of profanities within YA fiction keeps with the increased acceptance of obscenities in general, said Dr. Steven Schlozman, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

"Recall the multiple political figures who have been heard to use profanity when they assumed they were not on microphone," said Schlozman. "The subsequent [truth] that increased profanity within dialogue or first-persona narratives, or third-person familiar narratives, adds to the YA novel, and a kind of challenging that is characteristic of identity formation for all adolescents and young adults, especially in Western culture."

And that level of profanity that kids are learning and using these days can be shocking, said Dr. Victor Strasburger, a former member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications & Media. But, while media plays a strong role in influencing children's language and profanity, movies and television have a much more powerful role than books.

"Reading has always been a separate kind of media," said Strasburger. "Seeing your favorite movie star, or someone you identify with, spouting foul language is different than reading it on a page because with movies you have the visual processing, along with the auditory and role modeling. With books, you just have the visual."

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

Nothing Funny About Self-Deception, Researchers Say

Jupiterimages/Thinkstock(NORTH BRUNSWICK, N.J.) -- Everyone enjoys a good laugh now and then. Well, almost everyone, according to a Rutgers University study.

As you’ve probably discovered, there are people who just don’t see the humor in anything. Take them to a comedy club and you may as well have left them in the car because they’re just not going to crack a smile no matter what.

Rutgers anthropologists Robert Lynch and Robert Trivers claim the problem with non-laughers is that they are masters in self-deception, that is, they don’t pick up on the absurdities in life. As a result, these seemingly joyless people are missing out on what the rest of us might find hilarious.

Lynch and Trivers explain, “Humor often involves seeing something from a novel angle, with surprising and pleasing effects. But if you are practicing self-deception and blocking out certain angles, you will, when these angles are exposed, fail to see the absurdity and fail to enjoy the humor.”

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

Cholesterol Debate: HDL a Lost Cause?

Zoonar/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- A day after a study in the journal Lancet challenged the long-standing notion that raising levels of HDL -- commonly known as "good" cholesterol -- prevents heart attacks, top cardiology experts differed on whether the research really means the end of the road for therapies aimed at boosting HDL levels to beat back heart disease.

Some, like Dr. Philip Greenland, said the new evidence may very well close the book on such efforts.

"After several blows to the head of this theory, it is on the ropes, or maybe even down for the count," wrote Greenland, senior associate dean for clinical and translational research at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago, in an email to ABC News.

Others, like Dr. Christopher Cannon, say the story might not be over yet. While he admits that the study shows that raising good cholesterol to stave off heart disease is not as straightforward as first imagined, he believes that drugs now being tested that aim to boost HDL levels even higher may hold promise.

"It casts some doubt on the benefits of higher HDL, but the real answers will come from clinical trials of new medications that raise HDL," Cannon, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and senior investigator of the TIMI Study Group, said in an email. "We are testing a drug now... that increases HDL by 60 mg/dl on average -- and that will hopefully answer the question on whether HDL is important."

HDL levels are still an important predictor of heart health. For decades, doctors have used this measure as a way of predicting a patient's risk for future heart disease.

"These data do not take away the predictive value of HDL in the general population," said the new study's senior author Dr. Sekar Kathiresan, who is director of preventive cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "Low amounts of HDL cholesterol have been correlated with an increased risk of heart attack."

Naturally, this correlation made HDL levels seem an attractive target for drugs to reduce the risk of heart disease. To help doctors understand whether this was the case, Kathiresan and his colleagues looked at a group of people who had higher HDL levels because of differences in their genetic makeup. They compared these people with others without this genetic predisposition.

Based on past studies, the researchers expected the patients with higher HDL cholesterol to be protected from a heart attack. To their surprise, that was not the case; there was no difference between the two groups.

So what does this mean for patients? "Just because an intervention raises HDL, we cannot assume that this lowers the risk of a heart attack," Kathiresan said.

This study comes on the heels of several other recent clinical trials that suggest that medications designed to increase HDL are not effective in reducing coronary heart disease. These trials examined, among other things, extended-release niacin and several drugs in an experimental class of medications known as CETP inhibitors.

Several of these studies are still in progress. Yet, none of this research has demonstrated that raising HDL is effective at reducing the rates of heart attacks and heart disease.

Still, some experts in the field say despite the recent negative studies, many questions remain to be answered. Dr. Michael Miller, director of the Center for Preventive Cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical Center, said the findings of the study belie the complexity of HDL, and that more research is needed before such efforts are abandoned.

"Bottom line: don't throw the baby out with the bathwater," he said in an email. "The inverse relationship between HDL and heart disease is based on a half-century worth of data."

As for what the general public can take away from the research, Dr. Dean Ornish said the findings underscore the idea that when it comes to reducing heart disease risk, it's not a simple matter of good versus bad.

"I think this study shows a fundamental confusion about HDL," said Ornish, founder and president, Preventive Medicine Research Institute in San Francisco. "Not everything that raises HDL is good, and not everything that lowers it is bad."

"Many people, including physicians, get into a simple-minded idea that HDL is 'good cholesterol' and LDL is 'bad cholesterol.' It's not so simple."

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio