Health Highlights: April 24, 2008

Certain cattle materials that carry the highest risk of mad cow disease cannot be included in any animal feed, including pet food, says a U.S. Food and Drug Administration final regulation announced Wednesday.

The prohibited materials include the brains and spinal cords from cattle 30 months of age and older. The entire carcass of cattle not inspected and passed for human consumption is also prohibited, unless the cattle are less than 30 months old, or the brains and spinal cords have been removed, the FDA said.

It's believed the risk of mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy -- BSE) is extremely low in cattle less than 30 months old.

The final rule is effective a year from now in order to give the livestock, meat, rendering, and feed industries time to adapt their practices to the new regulation, which is designed to strengthen existing safeguards against mad cow disease, the FDA said.

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Atlantic City Bans Smoking in Casinos

Many employees of Atlantic City casinos felt like they won the jackpot after city council voted 9-0 Wednesday to plug a loophole in a statewide ban on smoking in public places that excluded casinos.

The casino smoking ban takes effect Oct. 15, but customers will still be allowed to smoke in unstaffed smoking lounges away from the table games and slot machines -- if individual casinos decided to build such lounges, theAssociated Pressreported.

Casino workers who attended the council meeting burst into applause and chanted, "Thank you, thank you, thank you," when the votes were counted. Many of the workers wore T-shirts with the slogan "Nobody deserves to work in an ashtray."

The city council tried in January 2007 to ban smoking in casinos. But intense pressure from the casino industry forced council to adopt a compromise law that restricted smoking to no more than 25 percent of the casino floor. But the smoking areas aren't walled off from nonsmoking areas, and secondhand smoke still drifts throughout the casino floor, theAPreported.

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Acupuncture Relieves Hot Flushes Caused by Breast Cancer Drug

Acupuncture helped relieve hot flushes in women taking the drug tamoxifen after breast cancer surgery, says a Norwegian study.

It included 59 patients randomly selected to receive either 10 weeks of traditional Chinese acupuncture or sham acupuncture. The women who received traditional acupuncture had a 50 percent reduction in daytime and nighttime hot flushes,United Press Internationalreported.

"Acupuncture is increasingly used in western countries to treat the problem of hot flushes in healthy postmenopausal women, so we wanted to see whether it was effective in women with breast cancer suffering from hot flushes as a result of their anti-estrogen medication," study author Jill Hervik, a physiotherapist and acupuncturist at Vestfold Central Hospital in Tonsberg, said in a prepared statement.

Tamoxifen can cause hot flushes and many other symptoms experienced by women going through menopause,UPIreported.

The study was presented at the European Breast Cancer Conference in Berlin.