Toll Free 1.866.429.9729

Year in Review: 10 Health Happenings of 2009

As the final hours of 2009 evaporated, U.S. News paused to reflect on the year's memorable health and medical science happenings, from progress toward a new president's ambitious agenda - revamping the nation's healthcare system - to the first influenza pandemic in 40 years to Michael Jackson's lethal dose of anesthesia medication propofol, which he reportedly used often to cope with his insomnia. Here's a roundup of 10 of the most interesting:

Mammography wars reignited.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force startled the medical world and women everywhere with its November announcement of revised mammography guidelines, which went against the perceived wisdom that more screening is better. The influential government panel of medical experts butted heads with other professional organizations when it pushed back the age at which women should begin having routine mammograms - to age 50, not 40 - and reduced the frequency to once every two years, not annually. (The American Cancer Society, for example, maintains that yearly mammograms should begin at age 40.) The panel questioned the value of mammography for women older than 74 and also advised against teaching women to do breast self-exams.

Big Tobacco gets policed.

On June 22, the Food and Drug Administration got historic power to regulate tobacco products when President Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. Three months later, the federal agency flexed its new regulatory muscle when it banned candy, clove, and fruit-flavored cigarettes in an effort to reduce the number of youngsters who get hooked on the habit, according to an agency news release.

A boon for embryonic stem cell research.

On March 9, scientists rejoiced when President Obama signed an executive order reversing a ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research imposed by President Bush. The Bush administration allowed the government to dish out federal dollars for research on embryonic stem cell lines only if they were "created before an arbitrary date, Aug. 9, 2001, but prohibited research on cell lines created after that date," according to a White House fact-sheet. Douglas Melton, codirector of Harvard Stem Cell Institute, told U.S. News contributing editor Nancy Shute last January that under the ban, he and others working with embryonic stem cells had to keep that research quarantined from the rest of their lab work (meaning that they had to use separate equipment.)

In December, the National Institutes of Health announced that it had OK'd 13 new human embryonic stem cell lines for use in federally funded research, with many more lines under consideration. It was the first major step since the presidential action.

"The American Cancer Society, for example, maintains that yearly mammograms should begin at age 40."

"Swine flu" pandem(onium)ic.

Just months after a novel influenza strain emerged and virtually shut down Mexico, infecting and killing its citizens at what seemed to be an unsettling clip, Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, bumped up the "swine flu" alert to its most extreme degree (after noting its easy spread from person to person and its appearance in 74 countries) and declared that "the world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic," the first in 40 years. Parallels were drawn between this strain, never before seen in humans, and the strain responsible for the deadly 1918 "Spanish flu" pandemic; both seemed to favor infecting young adults (though the current outbreak hasn't proven to be anywhere near as severe). Anxiety rippled through the country and was further stoked by President Obama's proclamation of a national emergency and vaccine shortages. There have been roughly 12,220 laboratory-confirmed deaths worldwide, the WHO said just after Christmas (the latest rough estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not verified by lab tests, suggests that the number of Americans killed stands at 10,000). Still, many experts have categorized this pandemic - predicted to be a wolf - as behaving more like a lamb. What the virus will do next, however, is unpredictable.

The Nobel Prize.

On October 5, three American scientists won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of "how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase," discoveries with enduring implications for aging and diseases like cancer. Chromosomes house our genetic makeup. But the natural propensity of their ends, called telomeres and often compared to plastic tips that keep shoelaces from fraying, is to erode away each time a cell divides, prize recipient Elizabeth Blackburn, a molecular biologist at the University of California–San Francisco, explained to U.S. News over the summer. The question of how chromosomes are nonetheless preserved led her and her then graduate student, Carol Greider, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and also a prize winner, to the discovery of the enzyme telomerase, which replenishes telomeres and keeps them healthy, hearty, and nicely topped off. If telomeres erode too much, cells age and their lifespan is cut short, though "there isn't a direct one-to-one correlation of telomere length with longevity of [an] organism," Greider recently said in an interview with U.S. News. Consumers, she added, should be wary of substances being hawked that claim to lengthen telomeres in the name of long life. Massachusetts General Hospital's Jack Szostak also shared the prize.

Autism rates rising?

In mid-December, autism was dubbed an "urgent public-health concern" in a report released by the CDC estimating that approximately 1 in 110 American 8-year-olds - or nearly 1 percent - has been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, a family of developmental disabilities. That figure, based on 2006 data from surveillance sites across the country, was a 57 percent jump in prevalence from an estimate the agency made in 2002. Whether the spike in diagnoses is due to a "true increase" or nothing more than improved awareness and better ability to pinpoint autism and related disorders is unclear, according to the report.

AIDS vaccine hope...sort of.

Excitement bubbled when scientists reported in September that an AIDS vaccine provided volunteers with some protection against the HIV virus, apparently cutting their risk of infection by 31 percent. It was hailed by some as a breakthrough, a glint of hope on a long trail of disappointment. (Merck pulled the plug on its high-profile vaccine trial in 2007, when the vaccine appeared not to shield participants from infection and perhaps even boosted the risk in some, several news outlets have reported.) The vaccine, a combination of two unproven vaccines, was given to more than 16,000 Thai adults and was designed to deal the virus a one-two punch. The reportedly $105 million trial seemed to be proving skeptics somewhat wrong, especially those who editorialized in Science in 2004 that it would turn out to be a waste of money. Later analyses, however, clouded the water, by suggesting that those hopeful results could have been due to chance. Some still view the results through optimistic eyes.

Longer lives?

In October, an article in the Lancet made an upbeat forecast: Most babies born in wealthy countries since the year 2000 will live to be 100, if trends in life expectancy don't halt. Life expectancy has been on an upward march, increasing dramatically in the past hundred years, thanks to things like better medicine and drops in infant mortality. And it isn't showing signs of braking anytime soon, the authors wrote. (The U.S. average stands at approximately 78 years, according to the CDC.) Although some experts believe that rising rates of obesity, diabetes, and other chronic ailments will derail such predictions, there's nothing wrong with a little optimism, right?

Meanwhile, results of a hotly anticipated study were finally released last summer, suggesting that rhesus monkeys placed on a quasi-starvation diet for 20 years - one with 30 percent fewer calories than usual - were 30 percent less likely than their normally fed peers to develop serious age-related diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and brain decay. The diet, known as calorie restriction, has been shown to increase life span in a diverse array of species, and because these monkeys - our evolutionary cousins - seemed to be responding in similarly beneficial ways, hope was sparked that it might hold relevance for people.

Continuing concerns about food safety.

A salmonella outbreak that tore through the nation's states, sickening hundreds and killing some, was traced to a culprit that no one wanted to see pegged: peanut butter. In February, Peanut Corp. of America, a company fingered as the source of it all, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. Questions about the FDA's competency were raised. Lawmakers are trying to pass legislation to give the FDA more authority to make the nation's food supply safe in light of this and other outbreaks, including one tied to spinach.

Healthcare overhaul.

Sen. Ted Kennedy didn't live long enough to see his longtime mission through. But overhaul of the nation's healthcare system took one step closer to reality this Christmas Eve when the Senate passed a long-awaited $871 billion healthcare reform bill one month after the House passed a version of its own. Next begins the thorny task of wrangling to reconcile the two versions into a final bill that, if passed, would "be the most important piece of social policy since the Social Security Act in the 1930s and the most important reform of our healthcare system since Medicare passed in the 1960s," President Obama said in remarks following the Senate's "historic" morning vote. This should be one for our 2010 Year in Review. Stay tuned.

For more information visit http://www.awalshimaging.com
COPYRIGHT 2009 U.S. News & World Report

Link To This Article