Testing drones carrying defibrillators
Researchers tested using small drones to carry heart defibrillators to homes where people had cardiac arrests.
The drones arrived about five minutes after launching — almost 17 minutes faster than ambulances. That’s a big deal for a condition where minutes mean life or death. The next step is to test the idea on real patients. But experts say the results in a Swedish study are remarkable and proof that the idea is worth exploring.
Cardiac arrest is a leading cause of death worldwide, killing more than six million people each year. Most patients don’t survive.
The Swedish researchers think drones could help reduce those dismal statistics. Their study was published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Fever during pregnancy may increase autism risk in offspring A mother’s fever during pregnancy, especially in the second trimester, is associated with a higher risk that her child will be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, researchers reported last week. Three or more fevers after 12 weeks of gestation may be linked to an even greater risk of the condition.
The study by researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health adds support for the theory that infectious agents that trigger a pregnant woman’s immune response may disrupt a fetus’s brain development and lead to disorders such as autism.
“Fever seems to be the driving force here,” not the infection itself, said Mady Hornig, director of translational research at the school’s Center for Infection and Immunity. The research was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. U.S. sees drop in teen vaping rates Teen vaping, which has been skyrocketing, fell dramatically last year in the United States.
A new government survey suggests the number of high school and middle school students using electronic cigarettes fell to 2.2 million last year, from three million the year before.
Health officials have worried about the booming popularity of vaping products among kids, and the potential impact the trend may have on adult smoking rates in the future.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the study Thursday. It’s the first decline CDC has reported in teen vaping since the agency began tracking in 2011. The results echo a University of Michigan survey that also detected a teen vaping decline in 2016. Seven per cent of adults believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows: U.S. study Seven per cent of all American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, according to a nationally representative online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy.
That works out to 16.4 million people who do not know that chocolate milk is milk, cocoa and sugar. But the most surprising thing about this figure may actually be that it isn’t higher.
For decades, observers in agriculture, nutrition and education have griped that many Americans are basically agriculturally illiterate.
They don’t know where food is grown, how it gets to stores — or even, in the case of chocolate milk, what’s in it. One Department of Agriculture study, commissioned in the early ’90s, found that nearly one in five adults did not know that hamburgers are made from beef.
Many more lacked familiarity with basic farming facts, like how big U.S. farms typically are and what food animals eat.
Farm groups argue the lack of basic food knowledge can lead to poor policy decisions.
A 2012 white paper from the National Institute for Animal Agriculture blamed consumers for what it considers bad farm regulations: “One factor driving today’s regulatory environment . . . is pressure applied by consumers,” the authors wrote. “Unfortunately, a majority of today’s consumers are at least three generations removed from agriculture, are not literate about where food comes from and how it is produced.”