Health Highlights: March 30, 2004

Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors of HealthDay:

Bioethics Council May Seek More Scrutiny of Fertility Clinics

Increased scrutiny of fertility clinics in the United States is expected to be among the recommendations included in a report to be released this week by the President's Council on Bioethics.

The Wall Street Journal, which received an advance copy, says the report advises the federal government to conduct more research on the health of test-tube babies and calls on Congress to ban certain kinds of research, including the mixing of animal and human embryos.

The council's final recommendations have been extensively revised from those contained in a draft report release last year. Critics charged that the earlier draft sought to ban common practices such as selling egg and sperm, and they objected to terminology that suggested laboratory embryos were the same as children.

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Mad Cow Testing Lab Not Secure

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) mad cow disease testing lab is not secure enough to safely store mad cow tissue samples, according to a USDA investigative report.

The lab, located in a strip mall in Ames, Iowa, has limited entrance and exit security and is located close to other businesses in the mall, the report says.

The USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) operates the Ames facility, which in December diagnosed the only known case of mad cow disease in the United States, the Associated Press reports.

While APHIS officials said the mad cow tissue samples posed little risk, they did agree the tissue samples should not be kept in the facility. The samples were moved out of the lab and staff have been instructed not to store any mad cow tissue samples at the site.

The government plans to relocate the lab as part of a current renovation of the service's National Centers for Animal Health.

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Sunlight May Increase Risk of HPV Infection

Sunlight may suppress women's immune system defenses and increase their risk of infection by the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV), says an American study.

"The sun is a kind of drug, a drug that influences whether a papilloma infection takes hold or not," researcher Dr. William Hrushesky of the WJB Dorn Veterans Administration Medical Center in Columbia, S.C. told the Associated Press.

He studied the results of more than 900,000 Pap tests done in southern Holland between 1983 and 1998. A Pap test isn't able to directly detect HPV, but it does reveal abnormal cells typically caused by papilloma virus infection.

The study found the women had higher rates of HPV during the sunniest years and the sunniest months. The Pap tests found twice as much evidence of papilloma virus infection in August -- the sunniest month in southern Holland -- than in winter.

The findings were presented Tuesday at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

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Children Don't Get Enough Sleep, Poll Finds

The phrase "sleeping like a baby" may be a misnomer, a new survey from the National Sleep Foundation finds, as even infants don't appear to be getting enough rest.

The poll of 1,400 parents and caregivers shows they are paying the price for kids' poor sleep habits because they aren't getting enough rest "for their own optimum performance," NSF chief executive Richard Gelula says in a prepared statement. What's worse is that many parents don't realize that their kids aren't getting the proper amount of sleep, he adds.

This chart summarizes the poll's findings:

Some 69 percent of children experience one or more sleep problems at least several times a week, parents' answers to the survey reveal. These problems include insomnia, snoring, and loud or heavy breathing while sleeping. More than half of the parents polled said their pediatrician failed to ask about their child's sleep habits, and that such a discussion became less likely as the child got older, the foundation's statement says.

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Drug to Prevent Premature Birth May Harm Babies' Brains

A drug commonly used to stave off premature birth may make children more susceptible to brain damage caused by a common pesticide, Duke University Medical Center researchers say.

Rats exposed to the preterm labor drug terbutaline and the insecticide chlorpyrifos suffered more brain cell damage than those exposed to the pesticide alone, the Duke pharmacologists say in a prepared statement.

The double exposure damaged brain regions known to play a role in learning and memory, according to the researchers' report in the March issue of the journal Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology. The study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Chlorpyrifos was among the most often used pesticides in the United States until 2000, when the federal government began restricting it for household use. However, it is still widely used for agricultural purposes, the Duke researchers say.

Premature labor occurs in about one in five U.S. pregnancies, their statement adds, and about 1 million women each year are treated with terbutaline or related drugs. The medication works to halt the early contractions that characterize preterm labor.

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Vietnam Says It's Free of Bird Flu

Vietnam declared itself bird-flu free on Tuesday, ignoring warnings from international health experts who insisted the announcement could well be premature, the Associated Press reports.

Vietnam, with 16 human deaths, and Thailand, with eight, had been the only two nations in which the avian virus was known to have jumped from birds to people. Although Vietnam conceded that a 12-year-old boy died from the illness on March 15, it said no new human or bird cases had been diagnosed since Feb. 26.

However, a spokesman for the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization said the agency hadn't been consulted on Vietnam's announcement, warning that it could backfire.

"The scientific community knows the virus can live for a long, long time," agency spokesman Anton Rychener told the AP. "We do not therefore believe that the bird flu has been eradicated."

In addition to the human toll, at least 100 million birds have been culled in eight Asian nations in an effort to keep the virus from spreading.