Acetaminophen in infancy again tied to asthma: study

(Reuters) – Babies given acetaminophen for fevers and aches may have a heightened risk of asthma symptoms in their preschool years, according to a Danish study.

The findings, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, focused on 411 Danish children and add to a mixed bag of research about whether there’s a link between acetaminophen – better known by the brand name Tylenol – and children’s asthma risk.

Researchers found that the more acetaminophen children were given as infants, the more likely they were to develop asthma-like symptoms in early childhood.

That statistical link alone does not prove that acetaminophen causes airway trouble, according to senior researcher Hans Bisgaard, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Copenhagen.

“We think it is too early to conclude a causal relationship,” he told Reuters Health in an email – though he added that the findings should encourage further research into a “plausible biological mechanism” by which acetaminophen could promote asthma.

The study included 336 children who were followed from birth to age seven, All had mothers with asthma, which put them at increased risk for the lung disease themselves.

Overall, 19 percent of the children had asthma-like symptoms by the age of three, meaning recurrent bouts of wheezing, breathlessness or coughing.

Bisgaard’s team found the risk generally went up the more often a child was given acetaminophen in the first year of life. For each doubling in the number of days a baby received the drug, there was a 28 percent increase in the risk of asthma symptoms.

The link disappeared, though, by the time the children were seven years old. At that point 14 percent of the children had asthma, and the risk was no greater for those given acetaminophen as babies.

Weeding out the specific effects of acetaminophen on asthma risk is tricky. The biggest reason is that children with asthma tend to get more severe respiratory infections.

Compared to other children, their colds may more often turn into bronchitis or pneumonia, so it would make sense that they’d be given the fever-reducing acetaminophen more often than other children would.

Bisgaard said that his team did have information on other factors, including the children’s rates of pneumonia and bronchitis, body weight and parents’ smoking – and they did not seem to account for the acetaminophen-asthma connection.

One recent study found that children given other common pain medications, including ibuprofen and naproxen, also had an increased asthma risk. The researchers said that suggested children with asthma symptoms were simply more likely to need the medications.

Bisgaard said that few babies in his study were given other painkillers, so it wasn’t possible to see whether those medications were linked to asthma symptoms. The study also included only children at higher-than-normal risk of asthma.

Bisgaard advised parents to only use acetaminophen when needed, like when a child has a fever.

“We would like to stress that the use of this drug indeed is beneficial in the appropriate circumstances,” he said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/ZeQrfo

(Reporting from New York by Amy Norton at Reuters Health; editing by Elaine Lies)

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Greek lawmakers back fresh cuts

11 November 2012 Last updated at 18:06 ET

Greek lawmakers have approved a 2013 budget involving fresh spending cuts, despite mass public street protests.

The budget was backed in by 167 votes to 128. The bill was a pre-condition for Athens to be granted a 31.5bn euro (£25bn; $ 40bn) EU/IMF loan necessary to stave off bankruptcy.

Another austerity package of tax rises and pension cuts was passed last week.

Ahead of the vote, more than 10,000 protesters rallied outside the parliament in the capital, Athens.

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras earlier warned that without the new loan, Greece would start running out of money on Friday.

Eurozone finance ministers are due to meet just hours after the vote in Athens, and Mr Samaras is now expected to travel to Brussels for a series of meetings.

The problem that he faces is that it could take some weeks before the EU backs the new instalment, BBC Athens correspondent Mark Lowen reports. The measure will have to be approved first by some parliaments, including Germany’s.

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Twin explosions strike southern Syrian city

BEIRUT (AP) — Syria‘s state-run news agency says two large explosions have struck the southern city of Daraa, causing multiple casualties and heavy material damage.

SANA did not immediately give further information or say what the target of Saturday’s explosions was.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the blasts went off near a branch of the country’s Military Intelligence in Daraa.

The Observatory, which relies on a network of activists on the ground, says the explosions were followed by clashes between regime forces and rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad.

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How Oscar entry “La Source” launched a campaign for clean water across Haiti

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The documentary “La Source” was originally conceived to be the tale of a single project, the efforts by a Princeton University janitor to bring clean water to a single village in rural Haiti.

Now, the film’s exposure has spawned a soccer field, two schools and 20 more villages with sanitary water.

The Oscar-nominated film, which follows Haiti-born Josue Lajeunesse as he fulfills his dream of bringing bacteria-free water to his native village, launched a regional project by the nonprofit Generosity Water to improve the lives of rural Haitians.

“We’re hoping that we can really continue to build on what this film was about,” producer Jordan Wagner told TheWrap’s Steve Pond at Thursday night showing of “La Source,” which is part of TheWrap’s annual Award Screening Series.

Seated at Los Angeles‘ Landmark Theatre alongside director Patrick Shen, producer Brandon Vedder and Lajeunesse, Wagner, the nonprofit’s director, said his organization has already carved out a spot in the film’s namesake village for a school and soccer field.

“We’re putting a plan together to use the film at screenings to mobilize people,” Wagner said. “We figured out which plot of land we’d buy, we’re going to build a primary school and a secondary school.”

Wagner met Lajeunesse after he was filmed in Shen’s “The Philosopher Kings,” a movie about the stories behind college custodians.

He began raising money after hearing the janitor’s lifelong desire to pipe clean water down from a mountain spring and into his village. Students and faculty at Princeton, where Lajeunesse worked after coming to the United States in 1990, held benefit concerts and donated money to help fund the project.

For Lajeunesse, the plan was decades in the works.

“I was seven or eight years old, but I had in my mind that I have to go to school in order to do something to take the people and the town out of the situation,” Lajeunesse told Landmark Theatre audience. “Day by day, day by day, I save, I save, I save but we didn’t know how we were going to start it.”

Then, in January 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, killing more than 250,000 people and destroying the impoverished nation’s infrastructure.

“The first time we went was about a month after the earthquake,” Vedder said, adding that the humidity in the Caribbean country nearly destroyed the cinematographers’ cameras. “It was hard to be another camera sticking in these people’s faces, right in their lives.”

The troubles didn’t end there. After the pipeline was built and Lajeunesse and his brother installed the spigots, it was clear how the film would begin and finish, but the meat of the story was harder to pare down.

“We knew where it would end, but the whole kind of middle part of the narrative was what was tricky,” Shen said. “We had to have discussions every night about the strategy for the next day.”

And, with $ 30,000 going toward the actual water project, the filmmakers quickly ran out of cash to support themselves during the months of editing.

“The story was happening whether we decided to make this film or not,” Wagner said. “We were scrambling to make this happen. We have the money for the project and this is happening and now we don’t have money for the film.”

Still, the filmmakers raised enough to keep the film alive after its spring-to-fall shooting schedule in 2010, working through the footage for a year and creating a few different cuts of the film before finding its final shape.

The movie premiered at Washington’s Silverdocs festival – the same festival where Wagner first met Shen at a screening of “The Philosopher Kings,” beginning a relationship that led directly to “La Source.”

The film was also a selection in the International Documentary Association’s annual DocuWeeks showcase, which qualified it for the Academy Awards via week-long engagements in Los Angeles and New York in August.

And though Lajeunesse hasn’t been back to Haiti since July 2010 – his janitorial and taxi jobs, plus four kids, make travel difficult – he said he gets phone calls from his family frequently, updating him on how the town is improving.

“Everyone there is so happy,” he said, drawing applause from the audience. “They have water and they don’t know what to say. All the town, they say, ‘tell everyone thank you for me.’”

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Beer after work at the bar: a U.S. tradition is getting stale

MILWAUKEE (Reuters) – A tattooed man with a goatee shakes five dice in a black cup, slams it down on the bar and watches as they come to rest among half-full beer bottles and empty shot glasses.

“Nothin,” he says in disgust as he quickly slaps down a $ 20 bill to buy another round of drinks, in a U.S. ritual of beer drinking after work that is undergoing a gradual decline.

“I used to get the third-shift Allen Bradley guys in the morning, but they have cut and cut jobs,” said Terry Zadra, owner of the 177-year-old Zad’s Roadhouse on the south side of Milwaukee.

The bar is just blocks from an industrial plant owned by Rockwell Automation, which bought Allen Bradley, a factory equipment company, in 1985.

One result of the 2008-2009 recession that reduced manufacturing jobs in places such as Milwaukee has been slower traffic at some bars, and sluggish beer sales nationwide over the past four years, according to industry analysts.

“Contrary to the myth that people go out and drown their sorrows, the truth is that beer drinkers are pretty responsible people and when they have to cut back, they’re cutting back on their pleasures,” said Chris Thorne, vice president of communications at the Beer Institute, a Washington-based trade group.

According to the institute, beer drinkers last year in the United States drank 203.4 million barrels, about 5 percent less than in 2008.

More concern about healthy living, stiffer drunk-driving laws and measures that ban smoking in places such as taverns have hit beer sales during the last couple of decades in Milwaukee and throughout the country.

“There has been a definite shift from the on-premise to the off-premise consumption,” said Pete Madland, executive director of the Tavern League of Wisconsin. “The smoker, for instance, is going to the liquor store, buying a 12-pack of beer and going home.”

Over the past few decades, it has become much less acceptable in the business community to have a drink during lunch or tip a few after work with colleagues.

“Society looks at that person that has a glass of beer with his burger like he has a drinking problem,” Madland said.

HIGH-END HOPES

A glimmer of hope for the industry is the high-end craft beer segment, which has seen sales increase by 14 percent during the first half of 2012 compared with the same period last year, according to the Beer Institute.

These regional and local brews are more expensive and tend to be more recession-proof than mass-consumption brands like Miller Lite and Bud Light.

“Those occupations that weathered the storm of the Great Recession and then a very weak recovery … they were always able to afford a high-end beer,” Thorne said. “We would still like to see that American pilsner part of the brewing market get back its share.”

Despite the cultural and economic pressures, beer remains synonymous with Milwaukee, where brewers such as Fred Miller, Joseph Schlitz, Val Blatz and Frederick Pabst built their empires more than a century ago.

Even after heavy manufacturing of farm equipment, marine diesels and cranes became the dominant force in Milwaukee’s economy, MillerCoors remains an institution, brewing about 10 million barrels of beer each year on the city’s west side.

The love affair the city has for beer remains strong, evident in its Major League baseball team – the Milwaukee Brewers – paying homage to the city’s beer makers while playing in Miller Park, sponsored by MillerCoors.

While beer consumption nationwide may be down, in Wisconsin it has increased a bit. In the first eight months of 2012, about 2 percent more beer was sold than the same period of 2011, the state revenue department said.

Milwaukee also remains a blue-collar town with a fair number of neighborhood taverns such as Zad’s Roadhouse still serving a shot and a beer to the working class from early morning until late into the night, according to Milwaukee historian John Gurda.

“The scene is far from gone. I’m talking about saloons and bars being the communal living rooms of Milwaukee, and in many neighborhoods, that’s still very much the case,” Gurda said.

(Editing by Greg McCune and Eric Walsh)

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‘Star Wars’: Disney’s Latest Empire

“Attacking that battle station ain’t my idea of courage. It’s more like suicide,” Han Solo warns Luke Skywalker in the first Star Wars film. As we know, the rebels’ wild risk-taking pays off, and they manage to bring down the Empire over the course of George Lucas’s holy trilogy. The movies may be an affirmation of chancy interstellar battle tactics, but Walt Disney’s (DIS) $ 4.05 billion purchase of Lucasfilm is best understood as an effort to make film production as risk-free as possible. On the analysts’ conference call following the announcement, Disney Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger was asked, “What do Star Wars films come in lieu of, creatively?” The answer: non–Star Wars films. Iger explained: “We actually determined that we’d be better off as a company releasing a sequel to Star Wars than probably most other, I’ll call them not-yet-determined, films.”

It’s no wonder Iger hopes to remove the risk from blockbuster moviemaking. This year, Walt Disney Studios released the disastrous John Carter and, in 2011, Mars Needs Moms, reported to be the biggest money loser in film history. (The company’s Marvel, Pixar, and Disney Animation output has performed much better.) Up next are a series of pricey hedged bets, new prospective franchises based on old material: the prequel Oz: The Great and Powerful (opening March 8); Johnny Depp in The Lone Ranger (July 3); and Maleficent (March 14, 2014), starring Angelina Jolie as the villainess from Sleeping Beauty. Iger noted, “One of the things that we were very mindful of is the value of brands and the value of properties that are both known and loved.” That describes Star Wars to a T but may not apply to a title like Maleficent, whose value is, let’s say, not yet determined.

With the Lucasfilm acquisition, one 2015 tent-pole slot goes to a Star Wars film, as sure a bet as exists in the film industry. The irony is that Star Wars itself is Hollywood’s greatest example of the virtue of risk-taking. After being rejected by Universal Studios (CMCSA) and United Artists, Lucas’s odd sci-fi scenario was picked up by Twentieth Century Fox (NWSA). As Lucas remembers in Tom Shone’s book Blockbuster, “Alan [Ladd Jr., president of Fox] …  said, ‘I don’t understand this movie, I don’t get it at all, but I think you’re a talented guy, and I want you to make this.’ ” Dumped into theaters inauspiciously in late May, when its presumed audience of children would still be in school, Star Wars drew massive crowds. The flocks of fans have kept the franchise minting money ever since (an estimated $ 33 billion so far, combining worldwide box office, DVD sales, and merchandise).

Granted, with its comparatively modest budget—$ 40 million in today’s dollars—Star Wars wasn’t as big a swing as recent big-budget gambits. And even Hollywood isn’t immune from surprises: Who’d have thought Liam Neeson would win fanboy love not from his roles in the Star Wars or Batman series, but from Taken, a $ 25 million revenge flick?

Oddly, the very particular set of skills that Lucas demonstrated with Star Wars—creating an original film franchise—are ones that contemporary studios refuse to nurture even with their favorite filmmakers. Today’s nerd-God auteurs came to prominence introducing original concepts in television (J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon), independent film (Christopher Nolan), or animation (Brad Bird), but their marquee live-action Hollywood credits have come on preexisting properties such as Star Trek, The Avengers, Batman, and Mission: Impossible. James Cameron’s Avatar is the exception that proves the rule: These days, if you want to make an event movie based on an original screenplay set in a galaxy far, far away, you’d better have written and directed the highest-grossing movie of all time first. It’s a sign of the times that the Lucas-worshiping Abrams, Whedon, and Cameron all have their next films lined up: sequels to Star Trek, The Avengers, and Avatar.

George Lucas’s sale to Disney will give a new generation of writers and directors the opportunity to make Star Wars movies. But it diminishes their chances of creating the next Star Wars.

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Syria opposition bloc elects Christian as leader

DOHA, Qatar (AP) — Syria‘s main opposition group in exile has elected a Christian Paris-based former geography teacher as its new president.

George Sabra said Friday that his election as head of the Syrian National Council is a sign that the opposition is not plagued by sectarian divisions.

Sabra says the SNC‘s main demand is to receive weapons from the international community. The U.S. and some other foreign backers of rebels fighting the regime of President Bashar Assad have so far refused to send weapons for fear they can fall into the wrong hands.

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Jimmy Kimmel’s Family Members Are Apparently Fair Game

We realize there’s only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:

RELATED: The Roots Take on ‘Call Me Maybe’ (and Win)

Watch this video, bookmark it, and watch it the next time you think you’d rather go home than wait in a long line to vote. Seriously, Time‘s look at the Rockaways on the election night hits the matrix where heart-break and optimism meet and it makes you really appreciate a right we shouldn’t take for granted: 

RELATED: Cookie Monster Batman and the Dog You Wish You Had

RELATED: Behold the Power of ‘Gangnam Style’

The best part of Louis C.K.’s SNL appearance was his “Lincoln” skit. Six days later, here we are with a new video: the director’s cut of the Lincoln-Louie parody—it’s funnier, dirtier, and one really awesome look at what NBC think is too offensive for network television. 

RELATED: The Robot That Performs Gangnam Style Better Than You

RELATED: The Uncle You Wish You Had and the Joy of Human Jukeboxes

Children, we’ve learned, are not safe from the pranks of Jimmy Kimmel. Neither is Jimmy Kimmel‘s aunt. 

And finally, the weekend is here. We’re talking like one hour away. This baby elephant video is clear evidence of that: 

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Stradivarius dealer gets six years for embezzlement

VIENNA (Reuters) – A dealer in rare Stradivarius violins coveted by the world’s top violinists was sentenced on Friday to six years in prison for embezzlement after his glittering global empire crumbled.

Dietmar Machold, 63, built his Bremen-based family business into a juggernaut with branches in Zurich, Vienna, New York and Chicago to serve elite musicians and collectors of the instruments that can command prices of several million dollars.

But the business collapsed in 2010, triggering claims against him worth tens of millions of euros (dollars) from creditors and clients who say they were bilked.

“I am a failure. I have lost everything,” Machold said in a Vienna court as he was sentenced after being convicted of embezzling client funds and hiding assets from creditors.

“You played for high stakes and you lost a lot, but you understand you have to take the responsibility for this,” Judge Claudia Moravec-Loidolt told him.

Prosecutor Herbert Harammer had traced the career of the fifth-generation violin expert who became one of the world’s most influential dealers in instruments crafted by 18th-century masters like Antonio Stradivari, whose workshop in Cremona, Italy produced some of the finest violins and cellos ever made.

“This ascent was built on sand,” Harammer had told the court, accusing Machold of leading a lifestyle that was a facade for a business that had actually been insolvent since mid-2006.

FIXTURE OF HIGH SOCIETY

A fixture of high society, Machold lived in an Austrian castle, had a fleet of expensive cars and collected watches and cameras. His global network of rare instrument dealerships let him move in the highest circles of music, fame and money.

His former wife and her mother got one-year suspended sentences for helping him hide precious musical instruments and a valuable watch collection as his business imploded.

Machold admitted from the start that he embezzled money made from the sale of instruments entrusted to him by his customers, but denied fraud charges that are being handled separately.

“I did what I did and I am to be punished for it. That is the way it has to be,” the German native told the court before sentencing, his voice calm before he teared up and had to pause.

Machold, who told the court he did not deserve a mild sentence given the magnitude of his misdeeds, had faced a sentence of up to 10 years. His lawyer did not say if he would file an appeal.

Machold said he acted in desperation after losing a lawsuit brought by a construction company which meant his Eichbuechl castle was at risk.

The high-profile dealer had at times given contradictory testimony, at one stage saying he built personal relationships with the instruments in his care that he called “my children”.

But later he said he “simply forgot” one expensive violin that he failed to report to administrators.

($ 1 = 0.7857 euros)

(Editing by Michael Roddy)

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Smokers may fare worse after colorectal surgery

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Smoking has long been linked with slower recovery in general from injuries and surgeries, and now a new study finds that smokers face more complications and higher chances of death following major surgery for colorectal cancers and other diseases.

“We wanted to see if smoking has a specific effect on these patients… and really wanted to know if patients who stopped smoking had better results,” said lead author Dr. Abhiram Sharma, who was at the University of Rochester in New York during the study.

Smoking constricts the flow of blood throughout the body and is thought to prevent oxygen from getting to tissues that are trying to heal, according to the authors.

In September, a review of surgeries to repair knee ligaments found that smokers tended to have worse outcomes, including not being able to get back full knee function. (See Reuters Health article of September 26, 2012: http://reut.rs/Xqf6is)

For the new report, published in the Annals of Surgery, Sharma and his colleagues studied patients included in a nationally representative database of U.S. surgeries between 2005 and 2010.

Overall, 47,574 patients were included in the analysis. All had part of their colon or rectum removed, a surgery known as a colorectal resection, either because of cancer, diverticular disease or inflammatory bowel disease.

About 60 percent of the patients had never smoked, 19 percent were former smokers and 20 percent were current smokers.

The researchers looked at the 30 days after surgery to see how many patients in each group suffered either a major complication – such as severe infection, heart or breathing problems or death – or a minor complication, such as an infection at the surgical site or in the urinary tract.

Sharma’s team found that current smokers had a 30 percent greater risk of having a major complication compared to patients who never smoked, and an 11 percent greater risk than ex-smokers.

Among 9,700 current smokers, for example, there were 1,497 major complications and 1,448 minor ones, whereas the 9,136 ex-smokers had 1,374 major and 1,386 minor complications. Never smokers, the largest group numbering 28,738, had 3,316 major complications and 3,462 minor ones.

Current smokers were also 1.5 times as likely to die within 30 days of surgery as never smokers.

In addition, the longer someone had smoked – that is, the greater their number of “pack years” – the stronger their chances of complications, the researchers note.

“We were not completely surprised (by the results). We know smoking is not good and there have been other studies that show smoking is a problem,” Sharma said.

There were, Sharma’s team acknowledges, some limitations in the study.

For example, ex-smokers were defined as patients who had not smoked in at least one year, therefore some more recent ex-smokers may have been included with current smokers, leading the benefits of quitting to be underestimated.

Nonetheless, Sharma told Reuters Health, the results show it’s never too late to stop smoking.

“The sooner the better,” he said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/XqnA9h Annals of Surgery, online October 10, 2012.

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