Health Highlights: Sept. 12, 2005

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

Katrina Death Toll in Louisiana Rises to 279

The Louisiana death toll from Hurricane Katrina rose to 279 on Monday, following the discovery of 45 bodies at a New Orleans hospital that had been abandoned more than a week earlier, the Associated Press reported.

Monday''s toll rose from Sunday''s tally of 197, a spokesman for the state Department of Health and Hospitals said. The bodies found at the 317-bed Memorial Medical Center were those of patients, the DHH spokesman said, without elaborating. The hospital remains closed and is still partially surrounded by floodwaters, the wire service reported.

Also Monday, the embattled chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Mike Brown, resigned amid heavy criticism of the federal government''s initial sluggish response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

Brown had been recalled to Washington three days earlier and replaced as the Bush Administration''s point person in overseeing the Katrina recovery effort.

"The focus has got to be on FEMA, what the people are trying to do down there," Brown told the AP in announcing that he was quitting his post.

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Infant Born to Brain-Dead Woman Dies

An infant born last month to a brain-damaged woman who had been kept alive on life support until the baby''s birth has died, the Associated Press reported Monday.

Susan Torres, born prematurely on Aug. 2 after her mother had been on life support for more than three months, died of heart failure on Sunday, her family told the AP. She had been rushed to emergency surgery to repair a perforated intestine.

The infant''s mother, also named Susan Torres, suffered a cancer-induced stroke in May. Once the elder Torres lost consciousness, her husband decided to keep her on life support so she could deliver the child.

The baby was born two months premature and weighed 1 pound, 13 ounces, the AP reported. Her birth at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington had become a race against time between the fetus'' development and the melanoma cancer that was ravaging her mother''s body, the wire service said.

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FDA Knew of Heart-Device Problems Before Releasing Alert: Report

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration received a report last February about problems with implanted heart defibrillators made by the Guidant Corp. but didn''t issue a safety alert until June, The New York Times reported Monday.

The report from Guidant contained data showing that one of its most widely used defibrillator models -- the Ventak Prizm 2 DR -- was suffering a short-circuit rate of about one a month. A month after the FDA received the report, a U.S. college student who had this model defibrillator died of sudden cardiac arrest.

Defibrillators are designed to deliver electric jolts to the heart to control irregular heart rhythms.

The FDA didn''t make the data public when it received it because the agency treats the information in such reports as confidential, the Times reported. The agency''s policy is to review these reports within 90 days of receiving them. However, it''s unclear whether the Guidant report was reviewed within this time frame or how FDA regulators first interpreted the data in the report, the newspaper said.

The Guidant controversy prompted a meeting of heart specialists that''s scheduled for this Friday in Washington, D.C. One of the major issues expected to be discussed is how much medical device safety data should be disclosed to doctors and patients, the Times reported.

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Older People''s Memory Hindered by Inability to Ignore Distractions

An inability to tune out distractions is the major reason why older people suffer memory problems, says a University of California, Berkeley study in the journal Nature Neurosciences.

Researchers used brain scans to compare the ability of younger adults (19 to 30) and older adults (60 to 77) to concentrate. The results showed that older people had no difficulty focusing on relevant information but weren''t as able as younger adults to tune out competing distractions.

"Difficulty filtering out distractions impacts a wide range of daily life activities, such as driving, social interactions and reading, and can greatly affect quality of life," lead researcher Dr. Adam Gazzaley told BBC News.

"These results reveal that efficiently focusing on relevant information is not enough to ensure successful memory. It is also necessary to filter distractions. Otherwise, our capacity-limited short-term memory system will be overloaded," Gazzaley said.

Fellow researcher Professor Mark D''Esposito told BBC News: "If you are unable to block out distracting information, you can''t really attend to what you are supposed to attend to, you can''t get in what you are supposed to remember, and you have a hard time retrieving what you are supposed to remember."

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Super-resistant E. Coli Germ Spreading Across Britain

A new super-resistant form of E. coli bacteria is spreading across Britain and has infected thousands of people and caused numerous deaths, says a report released Monday by the government Health Protection Agency (HPA).

This new E. coli strain was unknown before 2000 but began spreading rapidly in 2003, The Independent newspaper reported. This "superbug" causes blood poisoning in vulnerable people and is resistant to treatment with conventional antibiotics.

Outbreaks have been reported in Shrewsbury (300 cases of infection in 18 months) and in Southampton (1,000 cases of infection since 2003).

Attempts to control this strain of E. coli have been unsuccessful and it has spread across the country, the report said. People in the community as well as hospital patients are being affected.

The report is meant to alert doctors and hospital staff to improve laboratory reporting and surveillance of this infection.

Last Updated: Sept. 12, 2005